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THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 

OF THE WORKS OF 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 



THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS 

NOFELS AND ROMANCES 

TREASURE ISLAND 

PRINCE OTTO 

KIDNAPPED 

THE BLACK ARROW 

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 

THE WRONG BOX 

THE WRECKER 

DAVID BALFOUR 

THE EBB-TIDE 

WEIR OF HERMISTON 

ST. IVES 

SHORTER STORIES 

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS 

THE DYNAMITER 

THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. 

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS 

ESSArS, TRAVELS, AND SKETCHES 
AN INLAND VOYAGE 
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY 
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQ^UE 
FAMILIAR STUDIES 
THE AMATEUR EMlGRA'fiT, containing 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
ACROSS THE PLAINS 
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE 
ART OF WRITING 

POEMS 
COMPLETE POEMS 

Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets 
Per vol.^ Cloth, $1.00 ; Limp Leather, $I-2S net. 

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 



BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 

MEMORIES 
AND PORTRAITS 



BY 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 



?^^^ 

%^' 



^(,4^^ 

m. 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S.A. 



TO 

MY MOTHER 

IN THE NAME OF PAST JOY AND PRESENT SORROW 

I DEDICATE 

THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

S. S. "LuDGATE Hill" 

Within sight of Cape Race 



NOTE 

This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, 
it will be better to read through from the begin- 
ning, rather than dip into at random. A certain 
thread of meaning binds them. Memories of child- 
hood and youth, portraits of those who have gone 
before us in the battle, — taken together, they 
build up a face that '' I have loved long since and 
lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. 
This has come by accident; I had no design at 
first to be autobiographical ; I was but led away 
by the charm of beloved memories and by regret 
for the irrevocable dead ; and when my own young 
face (which is a face of the dead also) began to 
appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the 
first to be surprised at the occurrence. 

My grandfather the pious child, my father the 
idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus uncon- 
sciously exposed. Of their descendant, the person 
of to-day, I wish to keep the secret : not because 
I love him better, but because, with him, I am 



viii NOTE 

still in a business partnership, and cannot divide 

interests. 

Of the papers which make up the volume, some 

have appeared already in The Coriihill, Long- 

mmis, Scribner, The English Illustrated, The 

Magazine of Art, The Contemporary Reviezv; 

three are here in print for the first time; and two 

others have enjoyed only what may be regarded 

as a private circulation. 

R. L. S. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter f,— Page 

I The P^oreigner at Home .' 3 

II Some College Memories . . ^ 24 

III Old Mortality 37 

IV A College Magazine 55 

V An Old Scotch Gardener 73 

' VI Pastoral 85 

VII The Manse . 100 

VIII Memoirs of an Islet 113 

IX Thomas Stevenson 124 

^ X Talk and Talkers : First Paper .... 135 

XI Talk and Talkers: Second Paper . . . . 158 

XII The Character OF Dogs 178 

XIII "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" 19S 

XIV A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's .... 212' 

' XV A Gossip on Romance 229 

XVI A Humble Remonstrance 254 



MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 



I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 

" This is no my ain house; 
I ken by the biggin' o't." 

TWO recent books/ one by Mr. Grant 
White on England, one on France by the 
diaboHcally clever Mr. Hillebrand, may 
well have set people thinking on the divisions of 
races and nations. Such thoughts should arise 
with particular congruity and force to inhabitants 
of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many 
different stocks, babbling so many different dia- 
lects, and offering in its extent such singular con- 
trasts, from the busiest over-population to the 
unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the 
Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross 
the seas that we go abroad ; there are foreign parts 
of England ; and the race that has conquered so 
wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate 
the islands whence she sprang, Ireland, Wales, 

1 iS8r. 



MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

md the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to 
heir old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day 
:hat English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still 
thow in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the 
bouse of the last Cornish-speaking woman. Eng- 
lish itself, which will now frank the traveller 
through the most of North America, through the 
greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much 
Df the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China 
and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, 
in half a hundred varying stages of transition. 
You may go all over the States, and — setting 
aside the actual intrusion and influence of for- 
eigners, ^egro, French, or Chinese — you shall 
scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent 
as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glas- 
gow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between 
Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone 
round the world, but at home we still preserve the 
racy idioms of our fathers, and every county, in 
some parts every dale, has its own quality of, 
speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local 
custom and prejudice, even local religion and local 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 5 

law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth 
century — imperia in imperio, foreign things at 
home. 

In spite of these promptings to reflection, igno- 
rance of his neighbours is the character of the 
typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature, 
steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither 
curious nor quick about the life of others. In 
French colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I 
have read that there is an immediate and lively 
contact between the dominant and the dominated 
race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the 
least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier 
for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting 
with pride and ignorance. He figures among his 
vassals in the hour of peace with the same dis- 
dainful air that led him on to victory. A passing 
enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may 
deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his in- 
timates. He may be amused by a foreigner as 
by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study 
him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress 
with whom I profess myself in love, declares all 



6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the viands of Japan to be uneatable — a stagger- 
ing pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's 
marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner 
to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them 
solid English fare — roast beef and plum pudding, 
and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole 
of the Britannic folly. We will not eat the food 
of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, 
will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The 
same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American mission- 
aries, who had come thousands of miles to change 
the faith of Japan, and openly professed their igno- 
rance of the religions they were trying to supplant. 
I quote an American in this connection without 
scruple. Uncle Sam is better than John Bull, but 
he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr. 
Grant White the States are the New England 
States and nothing more. He wonders at the 
amount of drinking in London; let him try San 
Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance 
as to the status of women in America; but has 
he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name 
Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 7 

the most of the great Union as a term of re- 
proach. The Yankee States, of which he is so 
staunch a subject, are but a drop in the bucket. 
And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance 
of the hfe and prospects of America; every view 
partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the 
moral feeling proper, at the largest, to a clique 
of States ; and the whole scope and atmosphere 
not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far 
beyond him in reprobating the assumption and the 
incivility of my countryfolk to their cousins from 
beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly 
rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not 
know where to look when I find myself in com- 
pany with an American and see my countrymen 
unbending to him as to a performing dog. But 
in the case of Mr. Grant White example were 
better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more 
readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the 
English, and the New England self -sufficiency no 
better justified than the Britannic. 

It is so, perhaps, in all countries ; perhaps in all, 
men are most ignorant of the foreigners at home. 



8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

John Bull is- ignorant of the States ; he is probably 
ignorant of India; but considering his opportuni- 
ties, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer 
his own door. There is one country, for instance 
— its frontier not so far from London, its people 
closely akin, its language the same in all essentials 
with the P^nglish — of which I will go bail he 
knows nothing. His ignorance of the sister king- 
dom cannot be described ; it can only be illustrated 
by anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plau- 
sible manners and good intelligence, — a Univer- 
sity man, as the phrase goes, — a man, besides, 
who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing 
or two about the age we live in. We were deep in 
talk, whirling between Peterborough and London ; 
among other things, he began to describe some 
piece of legal injustice he had recently encoun- 
tered, and I observed in my innocence that things 
were not so in Scotland. " I beg your pardon," 
said he, " this is a matter of law." He had never 
heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be 
informed. The law was the same for the whole 
country, he told me roundly; every child knew 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 9 

that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him 
that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and 
had stood the brunt of an examination in the very 
law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a 
moment full in the face and dropped the conver- 
sation. This is a monstrous instance, if you like, 
but it does not stand alone in the experience of 
Scots. 

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in 
history, in religion, in education, and in the very 
look of nature and men's faces, not always widely, 
but always trenchantly. Many particulars that 
struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, 
a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt ourselves 
foreigners on many common provocations. A 
Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe 
and the United States, and never again receive 
so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange 
lands and manners as on his first excursion into 
England. The change from a hilly to a level 
country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along 
the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable 
towers of churches. He sees at the end of airy 



lo MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

vistas the revolution oi the windmill sails. He may- 
go where he pleases in the future ; he may see Alps, 
and Pyramids, and lions ; but it will be hard to beat 
the pleasure of that moment. There are, indeed, 
few merrier spectacles than that of many wind- 
mills bickering together in a fresh breeze over 
a woody country; their halting alacrity of move- 
ment, their pleasant business, making bread all 
day with uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigan- 
tically human, as of a creature half alive, put a 
spirit of romance into the tamest landscape. When 
the Scotch child sees them first he falls immedi- 
ately in love; and from that time forward wind- 
mills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their 
degree, with every feature of the life and land- 
scape. The warm, habitable age of towns and 
hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the 
country; the lush hedgerows, stiles and privy 
pathways in the fields; the sluggish, brimming 
rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells 
and the rapid, pertly sounding English speech — 
they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set 
to English airs in the child's story that he tells 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME ii 

himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears 
off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether 
it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever 
the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes 
to which you have been long accustomed suddenly 
awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or height- 
ens the sense of isolation. 

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the 
Scotchman's eye — the domestic architecture, the 
look of streets and buildings ; the quaint, venerable 
age of many, and the thin walls and warm colour- 
ing of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient 
buildings, above all in country places ; and those 
that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. 
Wood has been sparingly used in their construction ; 
the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not 
flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are 
steeper-pitched ; even a hill farm will have a massy, 
square, cold, and permanent appearance. English 
houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard 
toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the 
Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can 
never rest consciously on one of these brick houses 



12 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

— rickles of brick, as he mig \. call them — or on 
one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly 
reminded where he is, and instantly travels back 
in fancy to his home. " This is no my ain house ; 
I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is 
his own, bought with his own money, the key of 
it long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, 
and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his im- 
agination; nor does he cease to remember that, 
in the w^hole length and breadth of his native 
country, there was no building even distantly 
resembling it. 

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture 
that we count England foreign. The constitution 
of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise 
and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, 
sunk in matter, insolent, gross, and servile, makes 
a startling contrast with our own long-legged, 
long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. 
A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves 
the Scotchman gasping. It seems incredible that 
within the boundaries of his own island a class 
should have been thus forgotten. Even the edu- 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 13 

cated and intelligtJ.'t, who hold our own opinions 
and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them 
with a difference or from another reason, and to 
speak on all things with less interest and convic- 
tion. The first shock of English society is like a 
cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes 
looking for too much, and to be sure his first 
experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet 
surely his complaint is grounded; surely the 
speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in gen- 
erous ardour, the better part of the man too often 
withheld from the social commerce, and the con- 
tact of mind with mind evaded as with terror. 
A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of 
his own experience. He will not put you by with 
conversational counters and small jests; he will 
give you the best of himself, like one interested in 
life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain, 
interested in himself and others, eager for sym- 
pathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience 
in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman 
is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. 
He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, 



14 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not 
care to justify his indifference. Give him the 
wages of going on and being an Englishman, that 
is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you 
continue to associate, he would rather not be re- 
minded of your baser origin. Compared with the 
grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, 
the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, 
vulgar, and immodest. That you should continu- 
ally try to establish human and serious relations, 
that you should actually feel an interest in John 
Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest 
from him, may argue something more awake and 
lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the 
attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even 
the lowest class of the educated English towers 
over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders. 

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which 
Scotch and English youth begin to look about 
them, come to themselves in life, and gather up 
those first apprehensions which are the material of 
future thought and, to a great extent, -the rule of 
future conduct. I have been to school in both 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 15 

countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, 
something at once rougher and more tender, at 
once more reserve and more expansion, a greater 
habitual distance chequered by ghmpses of a nearer 
intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of tem- 
perament and sensibility. The boy of the South 
seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he 
gives himself to games as to a business, striving 
to excel, but is not readily transported by imagina- 
tion ; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind 
and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed 
with a lesser and a less romantic sense of life and 
of the future, and more immersed in present cir- 
cumstances. And certainly, for one thing, Eng- 
lish boys are younger for their age. Sabbath 
observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps 
serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boy- 
hood — days of great stillness and solitude for 
the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books 
and play, and in the intervals of studying the 
Shorter Catechism, the intellect and senses prey 
upon and test each other. The typical English 
Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the 



i6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

plethoric afternoon, leads perhaps to different re- 
sults. About the very cradle of the Scot there 
goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the 
w^hole of two divergent systems is summed up, 
not merely speciously, in the two first questions 
of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquir- 
ing, ''What is your name?" the Scottish striking 
at the very roots of life with, " What is the chief 
end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, 
" To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I 
do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Cate- 
chism ; but the fact of such a question being asked 
opens to us Scotch a great field of speculation; 
and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the 
peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly to- 
gether. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, 
and history, would have had patience for long 
theological discussions on the way to fight for 
Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aber- 
donian schooldays kept their influence to the end. 
We have spoken of the material conditions; nor 
need much more be said of these: of the land 
lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 17 

always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring 
winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone 
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard ; compared 
with the level streets, the warm colouring of the 
brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture, 
among which English children begin to grow up 
and come to themselves in life. As the stage of 
the University approaches, the contrast becomes 
more express. The English lad goes to Oxford 
or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gar- 
dens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disci- 
plined, and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be 
regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a 
piece of privilege besides, and a step that sepa- 
rates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. 
At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly 
different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a 
gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over 
the traffic of the city to recall him from the public- 
house where he has been lunching, or the streets 
where he has been wandering fancy-free. His 
college life has little of restraint, and nothing of 
necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique 



i8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

of the exclusive, studious, and cultured; no rotten 
borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on 
the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman 
in gloves must measure his scholarship with the 
plain, clownish laddie from the parish school. 
They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke 
cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume 
the labours of the field beside his peasant family. 
The first muster of a college class in Scotland is 
a scene of curious and painful interest; so many 
lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove 
in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence 
of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound 
of their own rustic voices. It was in these early 
days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affec- 
tion of his pupils, putting these uncouth, um- 
brageous students at their ease with ready human 
geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy demo- 
cratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; 
even when there is no cordiality there is always 
a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the 
competition of study the intellectual power of each 
is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 19 

ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into 
the humming, lampht city. At five o'clock you 
may see the last of us hiving from the college 
gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under 
the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost 
tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to 
intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the 
masters of the world; and some portion of our 
lives is always Saturday, la treve de Dieu. 

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his 
country and his country's history gradually grow- 
ing in the child's mind from story and from 
observation. A Scottish child hears much of ship- 
wreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and 
great sea-lights ; much of heathery mountains, wild 
clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to 
him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring 
of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted 
forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of 
oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely 
on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and 
constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of 
his country's history. The heroes and kings of 



20 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Scotland have been tragically fated; the most 
marking incidents in Scottish history — Flodden, 
Darien, or the Forty -five — were still either fail- 
ures or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the 
repeated reverses of the Bruce combine with the 
very smallness of the country to teach rather a 
moral than a material criterion for life. Britain 
is altogether small, the mere taproot of her ex- 
tended empire; Scotland, again, which alone the 
Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a 
little part of that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and 
unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once 
seemed to have perceived in an American boy a 
greater readiness of sympathy for lands that are 
great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It 
proved to be quite otherwise : a mere dumb piece 
of boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration 
to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my 
argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart 
of young Scotland will be always touched more 
nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty 
of life. 

^e may argue, and yet the difference is not 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 21 

explained. That Shorter Catechism which I took 
as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed 
in the city of Westminster. The division of races 
is more sharply marked within the borders of Scot- 
land itself than between the countries. Galloway 
and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like for- 
eign parts; yet you may choose a man from any 
of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove to have 
the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half 
ago the Highlander wore a different costume, 
spoke a different language, worshipped in another 
church, held different morals, and obeyed a differ- 
ent social constitution from his fellow-countrymen 
either of the South or North. Even the English, 
it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and 
the Highland costume as they were loathed by the 
remainder of the Scotch. Yet the Highlander felt 
himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the 
Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him at 
the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, 
unhomely land. When the Black Watch, after 
years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, 
veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at Port 



22 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed 
among men of their own race and language, where 
they were w^ell liked and treated with affection; 
but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed 
at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among 
a people who did not understand their speech, and 
who had hated, harried, and hanged them since 
the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most 
curious, the sons of chieftains were often educated 
on the continent of Europe. They went abroad 
speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not Eng- 
lish, but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, 
what idea had they in their minds when they thus, 
in thought, identified themselves with their an- 
cestral enemies? What was the sense in which 
they w^ere Scotch and not English, or Scotch and 
not Irish? Can a bare name be thus influential 
on the minds and affections of men, and a political 
aggregation blind them to the nature of facts? 
The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to 
answer, No; the far more galling business of 
Ireland clenches the negative from nearer home. 
Is it common education, common morals, a com- 



THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 23 

mon language, or a common faith, that joins men 
into nations ? There were practicahy none of these 
in the case we are considering. 

The fact remains : in spite of the difference of 
blood and language, the Lowlander feels himself 
the sentimental countryman of the Highlander. 
When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's 
necks in spirit; even at home there is a kind of 
clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his com- 
patriot in the South the Lowlander stands con- 
sciously apart. He has had a different training; 
he obeys different laws ; he makes his will in other 
terms, is otherwise divorced and married ; his eyes 
are not at home in an English landscape or with 
English houses ; his ear continues to remark the 
English speech; and even though his tongue ac- 
quire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong 
Scotch accent of the mind. 



II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES^ 

I AM asked to write something (it is not spe- 
cifically stated what) to the profit and glory 
of rny x4h]ia Mater; and the fact is I seem 
to be in very nearly the same case with those who 
addressed me, for while I am willing enough to 
write something, I know not what to write. Only 
one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it 
should be of the University itself and my own 
days under its shadow ; of the things that are still 
the same and of those that are already changed : 
such talk, in short, as would pass naturally between 
a student of to-day and one of yesterday, suppos- 
ing them to meet and grow confidential. 

The generations pass away swiftly enough on 
the high seas of life; more swiftly still in the 
little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so 

1 Written for the " Book " of the Edinburgh University Union 
Fancy Fair. 



SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 25 

that we see there, on a scale starthngly diminished, 
the flight of time and the succession of men. I 
looked for my name the other day in last year's 
case book of the Speculative. Naturally enough 
I looked for it near the end; it was not there, 
nor yet in the next column, so that I began to 
think it had been dropped at press; and wdien at 
last I found it, mounted on the shoulders of so 
many successors, and looking in that posture like 
the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of 
some of the dignity of years. This kind of dignity 
of temporal precession is likely, with prolonged 
life, to become more familiar, possibly less wel- 
come ; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on 
me now, and I am the more emboldened to speak 
with my successors in the tone of a parent and a 
praiser of things past. 

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a 
fallen University; it has doubtless some remains 
of good, for human institutions decline by gradual 
stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embel- 
lishments, it does; and what is perhaps more 
singular, beean to do so when I ceased to be a 



26 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very 
last of the very best of Alma Mater; the same 
thing, I hear (which makes it the more strange), 
had previously happened to my father; and if they 
are good and do not die, something not at all un- 
similar will be found in time to have befallen my 
successors of to-day. Of the specific points of 
change, of advantage in the past, of shortcoming 
in the present, I must own that, on a near exam- 
ination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief 
and far the most lamentable change is the absence 
of a certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, 
whose presence was for me the gist and heart of 
the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine 
occasional purposes of good, flinching acceptance 
of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning 
journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during 
lecture, and unquenchable gusto in the delights of 
truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my 
college life. You cannot fancy what you missed 
in missing him ; his virtues, I make sure, are in- 
conceivable to his successors, just as they were 
apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for 



SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 27 

I was practically alone in the pleasure I had in his 
society. Poor soul, I remember how much he was 
cast down at times, and how life (which had not 
yet begun) seemed to be already at an end, and 
hope quite dead, and misfortune and dishonour, 
like physical presences, dogging him as he went. 
And it may be worth while to add that these 
clouds rolled away in their season, and that all 
clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth 
in particular are things but of a moment. So 
this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full 
share of these concerns, and that very largely by 
his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, 
and in the midst of much misconduct, kept on in 
his own way learning how to work; and at last, 
to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of student- 
ship not openly shamed ; leaving behind him the 
University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal of 
its interest for myself. 

But while he is (in more senses than one) the 
first person, he is by no means the only one whom 
I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if they 
knew what they had lost, would regret also. They 



28 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

have still Tait, to be sure — long may they have 
him ! — and they have still Tait's class-room, cu- 
pola and all ; but think of what a different place 
it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll 
days) would be present on the benches, and, at 
the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior ^ was 
airing his robust old age. It is possible my suc- 
cessors may have never even heard of Old Lindsay ; 
but when he went, a link snapped with the last 
century. He had something of a rustic air, sturdy 
and fresh and plain; he spoke with a ripe east- 
country accent, which I used to admire; his remi- 
niscences were all of journeys on foot or highways 
busy with post-chaises — a Scotland before steam ; 
he had seen the coal fire on the Isle of May, and 
he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. 
Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished; 
it was only in his memory that I could see the 
huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream 
to leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the fire, 
lay hold unscorched of the windward bars of the 
furnace; it was only thus that I could see my 

1 Professor Tait's laboratory assistant. 



SOiVlE COLLEGE MEMORIES 29 

grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the sea- 
board road from Pittenweem to Crail, and for all 
his business hurry, drawing up to speak good- 
humouredly with those he met. And now, in his 
turn, Lindsay is gone also; inhabits only the 
memories of other men, till these shall follow him ; 
and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather 
figured in his. 

To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and 
I hear he has a prodigious deal of Greek; and 
they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled 
with the mathematics. And doubtless these are 
set-offs. But they cannot change the fact that 
Professor Blackie has retired, and that Professor 
Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete 
or truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There 
were unutterable lessons in the mere sight of that 
frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind 
like a fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order 
in his class by the spell of that very kindness. I 
have heard him drift into reminiscences in class 
time, though not for long, and give us glimpses 
of old-world life in out-of-the-way English 



30 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

parishes when he was young; thus playing the 
same part as Lindsay — the part of the surviv- 
ing memory, signahing out of the dark backward 
and abysm of time the images of perished things. 
But it was a part that scarce became him; he 
somehow lacked the means: for all his silver hair 
and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had 
too much of the unrest and petulant lire of youth, 
and too much invincible innocence of mind, to play 
the veteran well. The time to measure him best, 
to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, 
was when he received his class at home. What 
a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to 
amuse us like children with toys; and what an 
engaging nervousness of manner, as fearing that 
his efforts might not succeed! Truly he made us 
all feel like children, and like children embarrassed, 
but at the same time filled with sympathy for the 
conscientious, troubled elder-boy who was working 
so hard to entertain us. A theorist has held the 
view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as 
his spectacles ; that the mouth may be compressed 
and the brow smoothed artificially, but the sheen 



SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 31 

of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it must 
have been thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy 
I behold him frisking actively about the platform, 
pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most 
clearly is the way his glasses glittered wath affec- 
tion. I never knew but one other man who had 
(if you will permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle; 
and that was Dr. Appleton. But the light in his 
case was tempered and passive; in Kelland's it 
danced, and changed, and flashed vivaciously among 
the students, like a perpetual challenge to good- 
will. 

I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, 
for a good reason. Kelland's class I attended, 
once even gained there a certificate of merit, the 
only distinction of my University career. But 
although I am the holder of a certificate of at- 
tendance in the professor's own hand, I cannot re- 
member to have been present in the Greek class 
above a dozen times. Professor Blackie was even 
kind enough to remark (more than once), while 
in the very act of writing the document above 
referred to, that he did not know my face. In- 



32 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

deed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting 
upon an extensive and highly rational system of 
truantry, which cost me a great deal of trouble to 
put in exercise — perhaps as much as would have 
taught me Greek — and sent me forth into the 
world and the profession of letters with the merest 
shadow of an education. But they say it is always 
a good thing to have taken pains, and that success 
is its own reward, wdiatever be its nature ; so that, 
perhaps, even upon this I should plume myself, 
that no one ever played the truant with more 
deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates 
for less education. One consequence, however, of 
my system is that I have much less to say of Pro- 
fessor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; 
and as he is still alive, and will long, I hope, con- 
tinue to be so, it will not surprise you very much 
that I have no intention of saying it. 

Meanwhile, how many others have gone — 
Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who besides ; 
and of that tide of students that used to throng 
the arch and blacken the quadrangle, how many 
are scattered into the remotest parts of the earth, 



SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 32 

and how many more have lain down beside their 
fathers in their " resting-graves ! " And again, 
how many of these last have not found their way 
there, all too early, through the stress of educa- 
tion ! That was one thing, at least, from which 
my truantry protected me. I am sorry indeed that 
I have no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I 
were dead; nor do I know the name of that 
branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring at 
the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid 
tragedies in the life of the student, above all if 
he be poor, or drunken, or both ; but nothing more 
moves a wise man's pity than the case of the lad 
who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, 
for the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up 
one more figure, and have done. A student, ambi- 
tious of success by that hot, intemperate manner 
of study that now grows so common, read night 
and day for an examination. As he went on, the 
task became more easy to him, sleep was more 
easily banished, his brain grew hot and clear and 
more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily 
fuller and more orderly. It came to the eve of 



34 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the trial and he watched all night in his high 
chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already 
secure of success. His window looked eastward, 
and being (as I said) high up, and the house 
itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over 
dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last 
my student drew up his blind, and still in quite a 
jocund humour, looked abroad. Day was break- 
ing, the east was tinging with strange fires, the 
clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; 
and at the sight, nameless terror seized upon his 
mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed; 
he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and 
knew that it was normal ; but he could neither 
bear to see it nor find the strength to look away, 
and fled in panic from his chamber into the en- 
closure of the street. In the cool air and silence, 
and among the sleeping houses, his strength was 
renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory 
of what had passed, and an abject fear of its return. 

" Gallo canente, spes redit, 
Aegris salus refunditur, 
Lapsis fides revertitur," 



SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 35 

as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning 
Office. But to him that good hour of cockcrow, 
and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic, 
and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook 
to think of. He dared not return to his lodging; 
he could not eat; he sat down, he rose up, he 
w^andered ; the city woke about him with its cheer- 
ful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; and still he 
grew but the more absorbed in the distress of his 
recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the 
appointed hour, he came to the door of the place 
of examination; but when he was asked, he had 
forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, 
they had not the heart to send him away, but gave 
him a paper and admitted him, still nameless, to 
the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could 
only sit in a still growing horror, wa^iting nothing, 
ignorant of all, his mind filled with a single 
memory of the breaking day and his ow^n intoler- 
able fear. And that same night he w^as tossing 
in a brain fever. 

People are afraid of war and wounds and den- 
tists, all with excellent reason; but these are not 



26 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

to be compared with such chaotic terrors of the 
mind as fell on this young man, and made him 
cover his eyes from the innocent morning. We 
all have by our bedsides the box of the Merchant 
Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but 
when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let 
him have a care, for he is playing with the lock. 



III. OLD MORTALITY 



THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon 
on the one side by a prison, on the other 
by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, 
under a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many 
lines of rail, and the scream of the engine and the 
shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. 
The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres 
of families, door beyond door, like houses in a 
street; and in the mornins: the shadow of the 
prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall 
upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, 
I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are 
woven with my memory of the place. I here made 
friends with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor 
on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with 
one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped 
about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful 



38 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

housemaid of the hotel once, for some days to- 
gether, dumbly flirted with me from a window and 
kept my wild heart flying ; and once — she pos- 
sibly remembers — the wise Eugenia followed me 
to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, 
and in the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers 
helped her to repair the braid. But for the most 
part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable 
emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. 
Name after name, and to each the conventional 
attributions and the idle dates : a regiment of the 
unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and 
had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, 
in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of 
old mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced 
there was but one of whom my fancy had received 
a picture; and he, with his comely, florid counte- 
nance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his 
day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, 
like a taunt, among that company of phantom 
appellations. It was then possible to leave behind 
us something more explicit than these severe, mo- 
notonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, 



OLD MORTALITY 39 

the memory of a painted picture and what we call 
the immortality of a name, was hardly more desir- 
able than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as 
he lay composed beneath that '' circular idea," was 
fainter than a dream; and when the housemaid, 
broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the 
open window, the fame of that bewigged philos- 
opher melted like a raindrop in the sea. 

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the 
housemaid as for David Hume. The interests of 
youth are rarely frank ; his passions, like Noah's 
dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, 
and volume of his own nature, that is all that he 
has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and grey 
tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoic- 
ing faces of his elders, fill him with contemptu- 
ous surprise ; there also he seems to walk among 
the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course 
of years, and after much rubbing with his fellow- 
men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself 
from without and his fellows from within : to 
know his own for one among the thousand un- 
denoted countenances of the city street, and to 



40 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

divine in others the throb of human agony and 
hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital 
doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff 
of chloroform — for there, on the most thoughtless, 
the pains of others are burned home; but he will 
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles 
of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's 
life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is 
scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear 
to have come for so little, and to go again so 
wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief 
scene, to be still idle, and by way of cure, neglects 
the little that he has to do. The parable of the 
talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe 
in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful 
to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem 
not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and 
in evil part ; that young men may come to think of 
time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan 
wave back the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true 
peril ; this it is that sets them to pace the grave- 
yard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of 
pity and derision, the memorials of the dead. 



OLD MORTALITY 41 

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid 
human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, 
pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy of 
that Hfe in which they stand ; books of smihng or 
heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a 
large design, shadovv'ing the complexity of that 
game of consequences to which we all sit down, 
the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon 
flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity 
of which we know, and need to know, so little; 
avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous 
fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the 
average book a writer may be silent; he may set 
it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth 
was in the acrid fermentation, he should have 
fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Ober- 
mann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these 
pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is per- 
haps not far off when people will begin to count 
Moll Flanders, ay, or The Country Wife, more 
wholesome and more pious diet than these guide- 
books to consistent egoism. 

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of 



42 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the inhumanity of Obermann. And even while I 
still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, 
I began insensibly to turn my attention to the 
grave-diggers, and was weaned out of myself to 
observe the conduct of visitors. This was day- 
spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. 
Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, 
from within, nor to learn charity and modest}^ 
and justice from the sight; but still stared at them 
externally from the prison windows of my affecta- 
tion. Once I remember to have observed two 
working-women with a baby halting by a grave; 
there was something monumental in the grouping, 
one upright carrying the child, the other with 
bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of 
immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted 
them ; and, drawing near, I overheard their judg- 
ment on that wonder. " Eh ! what extravagance ! " 
To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, 
this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely 
base. 

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, consider- 
ing its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed^ 



OLD MORTALITY 

whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, 
high above Allan Water and in the shadow of 
Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance 
with the birds that still attended on his labours ; 
how some would even perch about him, waiting 
for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, 
how the species varied with the season of the year. 
But this was the very poetry of the profession. 
The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. A 
faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, 
but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had en- 
gagements to keep, not alone with the deliberate 
series of the seasons, but with mankind's clocks 
and hour-long measurement of time. And thus 
there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the 
hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men 
wrapped up in their grim business; they liked 
well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing 
in the key and throwing wide the grating; and 
they carried in their minds a calendar of names 
and dates. It would be " in fifty-twa " that such 
a tomb was last opened for " Miss Jemimy." It 
was thus they spoke of their past patients — fa- 



i^MORIES AND PORTRAITS 

miliarly but not without respect, like old family ser- 
vants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget 
that we possess; who does not wait at the bright 
table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently 
smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in 
his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. 
To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a super- 
ficial touch savours of paradox ; yet he was surely 
in error when he attributed insensibility to the 
digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet 
that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English 
sexton differs from the Scotch. The '' goodman 
delver," reckoning up his years of office, might 
have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a 
pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker 
does not count his cabinets, nor even an author 
his volumes, save when they stare upon him from 
the shelves ; but the grave-digger numbers his 
graves. He would indeed be something different 
from human if his solitary open-air and tragic 
labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. 
There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, 
among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies 



OLD MORTALITY 45 

and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual 
passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute 
drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts 
them; and this enumeration, which was at first 
perhaps appalling to his soul, in the process of 
years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to 
be his pride and pleasure. There are many com- 
mon stories telling how he piques himself on 
crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the 
old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffer- 
ing bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt 
in a cottage built into the w^all of the churchyard; 
and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he 
could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the 
upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I 
think, a Moderate : 't is certain, at least, that he 
took a very Roman view of death-bed dispositions ; 
for he told the old man that he had lived beyond 
man's natural years, that his life had been easy and 
reputable, that his family had all grown up and 
been a credit to his care, and that it now behoved 
him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the 
majority. The grave-digger heard him out; then 



46 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the 
other hand pointed through the window to the 
scene of his life-long labours. '' Doctor," he said, 
" I ha'e laid three hunner and fowerscore in that 
kirkyaird ; an it had been His wull," indicating 
Heaven, " I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made 
out the fower hunner." But it was not to be; 
this tragedian of the fifth act had now another 
part to play; and the time had come when others 
were to gird and carry him. 

II 

I WOULD fain strike a note that should be more 
heroical ; but the ground of all youth's suffering, 
solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is 
nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It 
is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues 
that are forgotten ; his is the vague epitaph. Pity 
him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where 
a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, 
he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and 
corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; 
to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor. 



OLD MORTALITY 47 

laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the 
rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still 
ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by-and-by 
his truant interests will leave that tortured body, 
slip abroad, and gather flowers. Then shall death 
appear before him in an altered guise; no longer 
as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's 
crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon 
those who fail to value him ; but now as a power 
that wounds him far more tenderly, not without 
solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereav- 
ing and yet storing up. 

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs 
our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen 
through storey after storey of our vanity and aspi- 
ration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is 
that we begin to measure the stature of our friends : 
how they stand between us and our own contempt, 
believing in our best ; how^ linking us with others, 
and still spreading wide the influential circle, they 
W'cave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary 
life ; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues 
and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. 



48 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

So that at the last, when such a pin falls out — 
when there vanishes in the least breath of time one 
of those rich magazines of life on which we drew 
for our supply — when he who had first dawned 
upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and, 
still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those 
clear features of the loved and living man, falls in 
a breath to memory and shadow, there falls along 
with him a whole wing of the palace of our life. 

Ill 

One such face I now remember ; one such blank 
some half a dozen of us labour to dissemble. In 
his youth he was most beautiful in person, most 
serene and genial by disposition ; full of racy words 
and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his 
coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, 
jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest 
student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to 
reside in him exhaustless ; we saw him stoop to 
play with us, but held him marked for higher des- 
tinies : we loved his notice : and I have rarely had 
my pride more gratified than when he sat at my 



OLD MORTALITY 49 

father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he 
walked among us, both hands full of gifts, carry- 
ing with nonchalance the seeds of a most influen- 
tial life. 

The powers and the ground of friendship is a 
mystery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in 
part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow 
of what he was to be. For w^ith all his beauty, 
power, breeding, urbanity, and mirth, there was 
in those days something soulless in our friend. 
He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, 
and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian 
pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can still 
see and hear him, as he went his way along the 
lamplit streets, La ci darcm la mano on his lips, 
a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and 
incredulous of good ; and sure enough, somewhere 
on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, 
his patrimony, and his self-respect, miserably went 
down. 

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he 
came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and 
consideration ; creeping to the family he had de- 



50 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

sertecl ; with broken wing, never more to rise. But 
in his face there was a Hght of knowledge that was 
new to it. Of the wounds of his body lie was never 
healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed 
resignation ; of his wounded pride, wx knew only 
from his silence. He returned to that city where 
he had lorded it in his ambitious youth ; lived there 
alone, seeing few ; striving to retrieve the irre- 
trievable ; at times still grappling with that mortal 
frailty that had brought him down; still joying 
in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but 
with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the 
shadow of that unalterable law which he had dis- 
avowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, 
when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he 
lay a great while dying, still without complaint, 
still finding interests ; to his last step gentle, urbane, 
and with the will to smile. 

The tale of this great failure is, to those who 
remained true to him, the tale of a success. In 
his youth he took thought for no one but himself; 
when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, 
he seemed to think of none but others. Such was 



OLD MORTALITY 51 

his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine 
courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion 
of remorse he never breathed a syhable; even 
regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. 
You would not have dreamed, if you had known 
him then, that this was that great faiku'e, that 
beacon to young men, over wdiose fall a whole 
society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have 
we gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful 
sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our princely 
bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and 
wisely counsel ; and it was only upon some return 
of our own thoughts that we were reminded what 
manner of man this was to whom we disembo- 
somed : a man, by his own fault, ruined ; shut out 
of the garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope 
both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the 
deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; 
and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave, and 
pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was 
so swallowed up in admiration that we could not 
dare to pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out 
again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost 



52 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

battle, he should have still the energy to light. 
He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, 
like one who condescended; but once ruined, with 
the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. 
Most men, finding themselves the authors of their 
own disgrace, rail the louder against God or des- 
tiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their 
friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. 
But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: 
mcnc, mate; and condemned himself to smiling 
silence. He had given trouble enough; had 
earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right 
to murmur. 

Thus w^as our old comrade, like Samson, care- 
less in his days of strength ; but on the coming of 
adversity, and when that strength was gone that 
had betrayed him — " for our strength is weak- 
ness " — he began to blossom and bring forth. 
Well, now, he is out of the fight : the burthen that 
he bore thrown down before the great deliverer. 

We 

" in the vast cathedral leave him : 

God accept him, 
Christ receive him ! " 



OLD MORTALITY 53 



IV 

If we go now and look on these innumerable 
epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely 
fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these 
foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends 
set up to glorify the difficult but not desperate life 
of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes 
of defeat. 

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last 
resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, mar- 
velling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, 
now that he is done with suffering, a pity most 
uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder. Before 
those who loved him, his memory shines like a 
reproach ; they honour him for silent lessons ; they 
cherish his example; and in what remains before 
them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the 
dead. For this proud man was one of those who 
prospered in the valley of humiliation ; — of 
whom Bunyan wrote that, " Though Christian 
had the hard hap to meet in the valley with 



54 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former 
times men have met with angels here; have 
found pearls here; and have in this place found 
the words of life." 



IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 



4 LL through my boyhood and youth, I was 
/~^ known and pointed out for the pattern of 
an idler; and yet I was always busy on 
my own private end, which was to learn to write. 
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, 
one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy 
fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when 
I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a 
pencil and a penny version-book would be in my 
hand, to note down the features of the scene or 
commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived 
with words. And what I thus wrote was for no 
ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. 
It was not so much that I wished to be an author 
(though I wished that too) as that I had vowed 
that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency 
that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as 



S6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. De- 
scription was the principal field of my exercise; 
for to any one with senses there is always some- 
thing worth describing, and town and country are 
but one continuous subject. But I worked in other 
ways also; often accompanied my walks with 
dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; 
and often exercised myself in writing down con- 
versations from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the 
diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and 
very speedily discarded, finding them a school of 
posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet 
this was not the most efficient part of my training. 
Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as 
I have learned them at all) the lower and less intel- 
lectual elements of the art, the choice of the essen- 
tial note and the right word: things that to a 
happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. 
And regarded as training, it had one grave defect ; 
for it set me no standard of achievement. So that 
there was perhaps more profit, as there was cer- 
tainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 57 

Whenever I read a book or a passage that particu- 
larly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an 
effect rendered with propriety, in which there was 
either some conspicuous force or some happy dis- 
tinction in the style, I must sit down at once and 
set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, 
and I knew it; and tried again, and was again 
unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least 
in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, 
in harmony, in construction, and in the co-ordina- 
tion of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape 
to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas 
Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, 
to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one 
of these monkey tricks, which was called The 
Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second 
part, The Vanity of Knozdedge; and as I had 
neither morality nor scholarship, the names were 
apt ; but the second part was never attempted, and 
the first part was written (which is my reason for 
recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than 
three times : first in the manner of Hazlitt, second 
in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a 



58 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of 
Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works : 
Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation 
of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an 
eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, 
Chaucer, and Morris : in Monmouth, a tragedy, I 
reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my 
innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many 
masters; in the first draft of The King's Pardon, 
a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than 
John Webster; in the second draft of the same 
piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my 
allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived 
my fable in a less serious vein — for it was not 
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that 
I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of 
thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants 
of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the 
Book of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, 
through all my abortive novels, and down to my 
later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for 
they were not only conceived at first under the 
bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 59 

resurrections : one, strangely bettered by another 
hand, came on the stage itself and was played 
by bodily actors; the other, originally known as 
S emir amis: a Tragedy , I have observed on book- 
stalls under the alias of Prince Otto, But enough 
has been said to show by what arts of imper- 
sonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts 
I first saw my words on paper. 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write ; 
whether I have profited or not, that is the way. 
It was so Keats learned, and there was never a 
finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it 
was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have 
learned; and that is why a revival of letters is 
always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to 
earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some 
one cry out : But this is not the way to be original ! 
It is not ; nor is there any way but to be born so. 
Nor yet, if you are born original, is there any- 
thing in this training that shall clip the wings of 
your originality. There can be none more original 
than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike 
Cicero ; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much 



6o MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the one must have tried in his time to imitate the 
other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in 
letters : he was of all men the most imitative. 
Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly 
from a school. It is only from a school that we 
can expect to have good writers; it is almost in- 
variably from a school that great writers, these 
lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything 
here that should astonish the considerate. Before 
he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the 
student should have tried all that are possible ; be- 
fore he can choose and preserve a fitting key of 
words, he should long have practised the literary 
scales; and it is only after years of such gym- 
nastic that he can sit down at last, legions of 
words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of 
phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and 
he himself knowing what he wants to do and 
(within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able 
to do it. 

And it is the great point of these imitations that 
there still shines beyond the student's reach his 
inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 6i 

still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a 
very true saying that failure is the only highroad 
to success. I must have had some disposition to 
learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own 
performances. I liked doing them indeed; but 
when they were done, I could see they were rub- 
bish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them 
even to my friends ; and such friends as I chose to 
be my confidants I must have chosen well, for they 
had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. 
" Padding," said one. Another wrote : " I cannot 
understand why you do lyrics so badly." No more 
could I ! Thrice I put myself in the way of a 
more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a 
magazine. These were returned; and I was not 
surprised nor even pained. If they had not been 
looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was 
the case, there w^as no good in repeating the ex- 
periment ; if they had been looked at — well, then 
I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on 
learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good 
fortune, which is the occasion of this paper, and 
by which I was able to see my literature in print. 



62 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and to measure experimentally how far I stood 
from the favour of the public. 

II 

The Speculative Society is a body of some an- 
tiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, 
Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, 
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celeb- 
rity besides. By an accident, variously explained, 
it has its rooms in the very buildings of the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, 
hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at 
night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining- 

a 

room ; a passage-like library, walled with books in 
their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, 
benches, a table, many prints of famous members, 
and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former sec- 
retary. Here a member can warm himself and 
loaf and read ; here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, 
he can smoke. The Senatus looks askance at 
these privileges; looks even with a somewhat 
vinegar aspect on the whole society ; which argues 
a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 63 

world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this 
haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the 
professorate. 

I sat one December morning in the library of 
the Speculative; a very humble-minded youth, 
though it was a virtue I never had much credit 
for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of 
the Spec. ; proud of the pipe I was smoking in the 
teeth of the Senatus ; and in particular, proud of 
being in the next room to three very distinguished 
students, who were then conversing beside the 
corridor fire. One of these has now his name on 
the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, 
is influential in the law courts. Of the death of 
the second, you have just been reading what I had 
to say. And the third also has escaped out of that 
battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may 
be so unwisely. They were all three, as I have 
said, notable students ; but this was the most con- 
spicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adven- 
turous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all 
men that I have known, the most like to one of 
Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended 



64 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

by an ill fortune, that could be properly set forth 
only in the Co medic Humaine. He had then his 
eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of 
which I write, he made a showy speech at a politi- 
cal dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the 
Courant, and the day after was dashed lower than 
earth with a charge of plagiarism in the Scotsman. 
Report would have it (I dare say, very wrongly) 
that he was betrayed by one in whom he particu- 
larly trusted, and that the author of the charge 
had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, 
at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired 
and envied by all ; and the next, though still but 
a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would 
have broken a less finely tempered spirit ; and even 
him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took 
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, dis- 
posed of the bulk of his considerable patrimony 
in the space of one winter. For years thereafter 
he lived I know not how ; always well dressed, 
always in good hotels and good society, always 
with empty pockets. The charm of his manner 
may have stood him in good stead; but though 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 65 

my own manners are very agreeable, I have never 
found in them a source of hvehhood; and to ex- 
plain the miracle of his continued existence, I must 
fall back upon the theory of the philosopher, that 
in his case, as in all of the same kind, " there 
was a suffering relative in the background." From 
this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, 
and presently sought me out in the character of 
a generous editor. It is in this part that I best 
remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungrace- 
ful stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, 
and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with 
an engaging ambiguity ; cocking at you one peaked 
eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse ; speak- 
ing low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr ; 
telling strange tales with singular deliberation and, 
to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all 
these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich 
student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; 
seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain 
of his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of 
his last overthrow. He had set himself to found 

the strangest thing in our society : one of those 

5 



66 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

periodical sheets from which men suppose them- 
selves to learn opinions ; in which young gentlemen 
from the universities are encouraged, at so much a 
line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and 
calumniate private individuals ; and which are now 
the source of glory, so that if a man's name be 
often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of 
demigod; and people will pardon him when he 
talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone ; 
and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, 
as they did the other day to General Boulanger; 
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have 
just done for me. Our fathers, when they were 
upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; 
building, it may be, a favourite slave into the 
foundations of their palace. It was with his own 
life that my companion disarmed the envy of the 
gods. He fought his paper single-handed; trust- 
ing no one, for he was something of a cynic ; up 
early and down late, for he was nothing of a 
sluggard ; daily ear-wigging influential men, for he 
was a master of ingratiation. In that slender and 
silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE G'j 

courage, that he should thus have died at his em- 
ployment; and doubtless ambition spoke loudly in 
his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there 
was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But 
he died, and his paper died after him; and of all 
this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to 
our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing. 
These three students sat, as I was saying, in 
the corridor, under the mural tablet that records 
the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary. We 
would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, 
and thought it a poor thing to come into the world 
at all and leave no more behind one than Macbean. 
And yet of these three, two are gone and have 
left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old 
and foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner 
of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling 
at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps 
for the love of Alma Mater (which may be still 
extant and flourishing) buys it, not without hag- 
gling, for some pence — this book may alone 
preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and 
Robert Glasgow Brown. 



68 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Their thoughts ran very differently on that De- 
cember morning; they were all on fire with ambi- 
tion; and when they had called me in to them, 
and made me a sharer in their design, I too became 
drunken with pride and hope. We were to found 
a University magazine. A pair of little, active 
brothers — Livingstone by name, great skippers on 
the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a 
book-shop over against the University building — 
had been debauched to play the part of publishers.* 
We four were to be conjunct editors and, what 
was the main point of the concern, to print our 
own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic 
— that flatterer of credulity — the adventure must 
succeed and bring great profit. Well, well : it 
was a bright vision. I went home that morning 
walking upon air. To have been chosen by these 
three distinguished students w^as to me the most 
unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of 
consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to 
my fellow-men ; and as I steered round the rail- 
ings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips 
from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 69 

heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco ; 
I knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, 
even if it were, that nobody would read it; and 
I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my 
compact income of twelve pounds per annum, pay- 
able monthly, to meet my share in the expense. 
It was a comfortable thought to me that I had a 
father. 

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which 
was the best part of it, for at least it was un- 
assuming; it ran four months in undisturbed 
obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first 
numbier was edited by all four of us with pro- 
digious bustle; the second fell principally into the 
hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; 
and it has long been a solemn question who it was 
that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still 
more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow 
sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' 
window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have 
gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead 
so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And, shall I 
say. Poor Editors ? I cannot pity myself, to whom 



70 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but 
only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, 
when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and 
instantly sickened and subsided into night/ I had 
sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was 
at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all 
that in her lay to break it; and she, with some 
tact, passed over the gift and my cherished con- 
tributions in silence. I will not say that I was 
pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any 
chance she takes up the work of her former ser- 
vant, that I thought the better of her taste. I 
cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had 
the necessary interview with my father, which 
passed off not amiss; paid over my share of the 
expense to the two little, active brothers, who 
rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped 
rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these 
two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some 
graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole 
episode, I told myself that the time was not 
yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to work I 
went again with my penny version-books, having 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 71 

fallen back in one day from the printed author 
to the manuscript student. 

Ill 

From this defunct periodical I am going to re- 
print one of my own papers. The poor little piece 
is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to 
straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, 
and it remains invertebrate and wordy. No self- 
respecting magazine would print the thing; and 
here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any 
worth of its own, but for the sake of the man 
whom it purports dimly to represent and some of 
whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume 
of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the 
Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John 
Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and 
Robert drew very close together in their lives; 
for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae; 
and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden 
in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I 
liked John the better of the two; he had grit and 
dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases 



72 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

men with any savage inheritance of blood; and 
he was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy 
fancy. But however that may be, and however 
Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch 
that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and 
beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to re- 
cast a piece of work so old, I should like well to 
draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think 
of him and of John, I wonder in what other country 
two such men would be found dwelling together, 
in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the woody 
fold of a green hill. 



V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 

I THINK I might almost have said the last: 
somewhere, indeed, in the uttermost glens 
of the Lammermuir or among the south- 
western hills there may yet linger a decrepit rep- 
resentative of this by-gone good fellowship; but 
as far as actual experience goes, I have only met 
one man in my life who might fitly be quoted 
in the same breath with Andrew Fairservice, — 
though without his vices. He was a man whose 
very presence could impart a savour of quaint 
antiquity to the baldest and most modern flower- 
plots. There was a dignity about his tall stooping 
form, and an earnestness in his w^rinkled face that 
recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who 
had come through the training of the Covenant, 
and been nourished in his youth on Walker's Lives 
and The Hind let Loose. 

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass 
away with no sketch preserved of his old-fashioned 



74 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

virtues, I hope the reader will take this as an ex- 
cuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly 
as he can the infirmities of my description. To 
me, who find it so difficult to tell the little that I 
know, he stands essentially as a genius loci. It is 
impossible to separate his spare form and old 
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the 
hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its 
shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of cham- 
paign that one saw from the north-west corner. 
The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of 
each other. When I take him from his right sur- 
roundings and try to make him appear for me on 
paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal : the best 
that I can say may convey some notion to those 
that never saw him, but to me it will be ever 
impotent. 

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert 
was pretty old already: he had certainly begun 
to use his years as a stalking horse. Latterly he 
was beyond all the impudencies of logic, consider- 
ing a reference to the parish register worth all the 
reasons in the world. '" / am old and zvell stricken 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 75 

in years/' he was wont to say; and I never found 
any one bold enough to answer the argument. 
Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who 
were not yet octogenarian, he had some other 
drawbacks as a gardener. He shrank the very 
place he cultivated. The dignity and reduced 
gentility of his appearance made the small garden 
cut a sorry figure. He was full of tales of greater 
situations in his younger days. He spoke of castles 
and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told 
of places where under-gardeners had trembled at 
his looks, where there were meres and swanneries, 
labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrub- 
bery in his control, till you could not help feeling 
that it was condescension on his part to dress your 
humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once 
into an invidious position. You felt that you were 
profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his 
poverty and not his will consented to your vulgar 
rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with 
the swineherd that made Alfred watch his calces, 
or some bloated citizen who may have given his 
sons and his condescension to the fallen Dionysius, 



76 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and 
metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over 
your feelings he extended to your garden, and, 
through the garden, to your diet. He would trim 
a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the 
most favoured and fertile section of the garden 
with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in 
supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked 
him to send you in one of your own artichokes, 
" That I wull, mem," he would say, " zvith pleasure^ 
for it is niair blessed to give than to receive." Ay, 
and even when, by extra twisting of the screw, 
we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to 
his own inclination, and he went away, stately and 
sad, professing that " our wull was his pleasure,'^ 
but yet reminding us that he would do it " zvith 
feelin's/' — even then, I say, the triumphant master 
felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on 
sufferance only, that he was taking a mean ad- 
vantage of the other's low estate, and that the 
whole scene had been one of those '' slights that 
patient merit of the unworthy takes." 

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 77 

catholic; affecting sunflowers and dahlias, wall- 
flowers and roses, and holding in supreme aver- 
sion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned, or 
wild. There was one exception to this sweeping 
ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the 
last count, he not only spared, but loved; and 
when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed 
his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in 
order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as 
he told me once, speaking in that tone that only 
actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use 
nowadays, his heart grew " proud " within him 
when he came on a burn-course among the braes of 
Manor that shone purple with their graceful tro- 
phies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice 
for so many years of precise gardening had ban- 
ished these boyish recollections from his heart. 
Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty 
of all that was by-gone. He abounded in old stories 
of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his 
former pleasures ; and when he went (on a holiday) 
to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth 
where he had served before, he came back full of 



78 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

little pre-Raphaelite reminiscences that showed real 
passion for the past, such as might have shaken 
hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques. 

But however his sympathy with his old feelings 
might affect his liking for the foxgloves, the very 
truth was that he scorned all flowers together. 
They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling 
ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves. It v/as to- 
wards his cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that 
his heart grew warm. His preference for the more 
useful growths was such that cabbages were found 
invading the flower-plots, and an outpost of savoys 
was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. 
He would prelect over some thriving plant with 
wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on remi- 
niscence of former and perhaps yet finer speci- 
mens. Yet even then he did not let the credit 
leave himself. He had, indeed, raised " finer o' 
them " ; but it seemed that no one else had been 
favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, 
in fact, were mere foils to his own superior at- 
tainments; and he would recount, with perfect 
soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 79 

wondered, and such another could scarcely give 
credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his rivals only 
that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked 
how well a plant was looking, he would gravely 
touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; 
all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the 
other hand, you called his attention to some back- 
going vegetable, he would quote Scripture : " Paul 
may plant and Apollos may water " ; all blame 
being left to Providence, on the score of deficient 
rain or untimely frosts. 

There was one thing in the garden that shared 
his preference with his favourite cabbages and 
rhubarb, and that other was the bee-hive. Their 
sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product 
also had taken hold of his imagination and heart, 
whether by way of memory or no I cannot say, 
although perhaps the bees too were linked to him 
by some recollection of Manor braes and his 
country childhood. Nevertheless, he was too chary 
of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his 
personal dignity to mingle in any active office to- 
wards them. But he could stand by while one of 



8o MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the contemned rivals did the work for him, and 
protest that it was quite safe in spite of his own 
considerate distance and the cries of the distressed 
assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a man 
of word than deed, and some of his most striking 
sentences had the bees for text. '' They are indeed 
zvonderfu' creatures, mem," he said once. '' They 
just mind me o' what the Queen of Sheba said to 
Solomon — and I think she said it zvi' a sigh — 
^ The half of it hath not been told unto me/' 

As far as the Bible goes he was deeply read. 
Like the old Covenanters, of whom he was the 
worthy representative, his mouth was full of 
sacred quotations; it was the book that he had 
studied most and thought upon most deeply. To 
many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps 
Burns, are the only books of any vital literary merit 
that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on 
the draff of country newspapers, and the very in- 
structive but not very palatable pabulum of some 
cheap educational series. This was Robert's posi- 
tion. All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew 
stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 8i 

poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck 
deep root into his heart, and the very expressions 
had become a part of him ; so that he rarely spoke 
without some antique idiom or Scripture manner- 
ism that gave a raciness to the merest trivialities of 
talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop 
here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase 
and ready store of reference. He was imbued with 
a spirit of peace and love : he interposed between 
man and wife : he threw himself between the 
angry, touching his hat the while with all the cere- 
mony of an usher: he protected the birds from 
everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a great 
difference between official execution and wanton 
sport. His mistress telling him one day to put 
some ferns into his master's particular corner, and 
adding, " Though, indeed, Robert, he does n't 
deserve them, for he would n't help me to gather 
them," '' Eh, mem," replies Robert, '' hut I zvoiild- 
nae soy that, for I think he 's just a most deservin' 
gentleman." Again, two of our friends, who were 
on intimate terms, and accustomed to use language 

to each other somewhat without the bounds of the 

6 



82 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

parliamentary, happened to differ about the posi- 
tion of a seat in the garden. The discussion, as 
was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed 
tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accus- 
tomed to such controversies several times a day 
was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat 
abusive wit — every one but Robert, to whom the 
perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed un- 
questionable, and who, after having waited till his 
conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and 
till he expected every moment that the disputants 
would fall to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of 
almost tearful entreaty: ''Eh, hut, gentlemen, I 
zvad hae nae mair zvords about it! " One thing 
was noticeable about Robert's religion : it was 
neither dogmatic nor sectarian. He never expa- 
tiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of 
his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. 
I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, 
Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably out 
of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for 
Prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must 
have made him a little sore about Free-Church- 



AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 83 

ism; but at least, he never talked about these 
views, never grew controversially noisy, and never 
openly aspersed the belief or practice of anybody. 
Now all this is not generally characteristic of 
Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches militant 
with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual 
crusaders the one against the other, and mission- 
aries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's origi- 
nally tender heart was what made the difference; 
or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among 
fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny 
creed than those whose work is among the tares of 
fallen humanity; and the soft influences of the 
garden had entered deep into his spirit, 

" Annihilating all that 's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden 
sayings or telling of his innocent and living piety. 
I had meant to tell of his cottage, with the German 
pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell 
box that he had made for his son, and of which 
he would say pathetically : '' He zvas real pleased 
wi it at first J hut I think he 's got a kind 0' tired o' 



84 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

it now " — the son being then a man of about forty. 
But I will let all these pass. " 'T is more signifi- 
cant : he 's dead." The earth, that he had digged 
so much in his life, was dug out by another for 
himself; and the flowers that he had tended drew 
their life still from him, but in a new and nearer 
way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it 
too wished to honour the obsequies of one who had 
so often quoted Scripture in favour of its kind: 
'^ Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing ? and 
yet not one of them falleth to the ground." 

Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in 
the place of death to greet him " with taunting 
proverbs " as they rose to greet the haughty Baby- 
lonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peace- 
maker, and a servant of God. 



VI. PASTORAL 

TO leave home in early life is to be stunned 
and quickened with novelties; but when 
years have come, it only casts a more en- 
dearing light upon the past. As in those composite 
photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each 
new sitter brings out but the more clearly the 
central features of the race; when once youth has 
flown, each new impression only deepens the sense 
of nationality and the desire of native places. So 
may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany 
Regiment, as he mounted guard about French 
citadels, so may some officer marching his company 
of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt 
the soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or 
started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of 
peat-smoke. And the riverS' of home are dear in 
particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, 
who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar ; it is con- 
fined to no race nor country, for I know one of 



86 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy 
still lingers about the lilied lowland waters of that 
shire. But the streams of Scotland are incompar- 
able in themselves — or I am only the more Scot- 
tish to suppose so — and their sound and colour 
dwell for ever in the memory. How often and will- 
ingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or 
Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in 
its Lynn ; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the 
golden burn that pours and sulks in the den behind 
Kingussie ! I think shame to leave out one of these 
enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if 
I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan 
Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; 
nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leith of 
the many and well-named mills — Bell's Mills, and 
Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn 
of pleasant memories ; nor yet, for all its smallness, 
that nameless trickle that springs in the green 
bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside 
with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss 
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool 
there, overhung by a rock, where I loved to sit 



PASTORAL 87 

and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its 
infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of 
the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many 
points in the moss you may see at one glance its 
whole course and that of all its tributaries; the 
geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners 
without sitting down, and not yet begin to be 
breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are 
but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder 
of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem 
to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland 
sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole 
discharge of the toy river; it would take it an 
appreciable time to fill your morning bath ; for the 
most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the 
moss ; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and 
the figure of a certain gcftius loci, I am condemned 
to linger awhile in fancy by its shores ; and if the 
nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) 
will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the 
reader along with me. 

John Todd, when I knew him, was already " the 
oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all 



88 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

his days faithful to that curlew-scattering, sheep- 
collecting life. He remembered the droving days, 
when the drove roads, that now lie green and soli- 
tary through the heather, were thronged thor- 
oughfares. He had himself often marched flocks 
into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his 
caravan; and by his account it was a rough busi- 
ness not without danger. The drove roads lay 
apart from habitation; the drovers met in the 
wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet 
off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and 
in the one as in the other case rough habits and 
fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed, 
sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; 
most of which offences had a moorland burial 
and were never heard of in the courts of justice. 
John, in those days, was at least once attacked, 
— by two men after his watch, — and at least 
once, betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under 
the danger of the law and was clapped into some 
rustic prison-house, the doors of which he burst 
in the night and was no more heard of in that 
quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in 



PASTORAL 89 

quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dul- 
ness of his dogs and the inroads of pedestrians 
from town. But for a man of his propensity to 
wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest 
nor peace, except by snatches; in the grey of the 
summer morning, and ah-eady from far up the 
hill, he would wake the " toun " with the sound 
of his shoutings; and in the lambing time, his 
cries were not yet silenced late at night. This 
wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to 
haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible 
bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which 
men stood of John a touch of something legendary. 
For my own part, he w^as at first my enemy, and 
I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural 
abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near 
at hand, knowing him only by some sudden blast 
of bellowing from far above, bidding me " c'way 
oot amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of 
the hill harboured this ogre; I skulked in my 
favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the 
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, 
and his dogs my questing dragoons. Little by 



90 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

little we dropped into civilities ; his hail at sight of 
me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan ; 
soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, 
which was with him, like the calumet w^ith the 
Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and 
at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew to be 
a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these 
parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John 
to '' give me a cry " over the garden wall as he set 
forth upon his evening round, and for me to over- 
take and bear him company. 

That dread voice of his that shook the hills 
when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleas- 
antly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly 
whine, not far off singing, that w^as eminently 
Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he 
did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but 
somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His 
face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy 
and stiff with weathering; more like a picture 
than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat 
of latent anger in the expression, like that of a 
man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual 



PASTORAL 91 

vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch 
I ever heard ; the words in themselves were a pleas- 
ure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came 
back from one of our patrols with new acqui- 
sitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like 
a master, stalking a little before me, " beard on 
shoulder," the plaid hanging loosely about him, 
the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guid- 
ing me up-hill by that devious, tactical ascent 
which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might 
count him with the best talkers; only that talking 
Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. 
He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned 
it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; 
when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own 
antique business, the thing took on a colour of 
romance and curiosity that was surprising. The 
clans of sheep with their particular territories on 
the hill, and how, in the yearly killings and pur- 
chases, each must be proportionally thinned and 
strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, 
the signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy 
season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the exqui- 



92 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

site cunning of dogs : all these he could present so 
humanly, and with so much old experience and 
living gusto, that weariness was excluded. And 
in the midst he would suddenly straighten his 
bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demon- 
stration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll 
out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw 
at last the use of that great wealth of names for 
every knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the 
dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and 
raised faces, would run up their flags again to the 
masthead and spread themselves upon the indi- 
cated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder how 
they could follow and retain so long a story. But 
John denied these creatures all intelligence; they 
were the constant butt of his passion and contempt ; 
it was just possible to work with the like of them, 
he said, — not more than possible. And then he 
would expand upon the subject of the really good 
dogs that he had known, and the one really good 
dog that he had himself possessed. He had been 
offered forty pounds for it; but a good collie was 
worth more than that, more than anything, to a 



PASTORAL 93 

" herd " ; he did the herd's work for him. " As 
for the Hke of them ! " he would cry, and scorn- 
fully indicate the scouring tails of his assistants. 

Once — I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot 
do it justice, being born Britannis in montibiis, in- 
deed, but alas ! ineriidito scuctilo — once, in the 
days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep 
in Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being 
crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach to 
John, and a slur upon the dog ; and both were alive 
to their misfortune. Word came, after some days, 
that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of 
sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask 
for restitution. But the farmer was a hard man 
and stood upon his rights. *' How were they 
marked ? " he asked ; and since John had bought 
right and left from many sellers and had no notion 
of the marks — " Very well," said the farmer, 
" then it 's only right that I should keep them — " 
" Well," said John, " it 's a fact that I cannae tell 
the sheep; but if my dog can, will ye let me have 
them ? " The farmer was honest as well as hard, 
and besides I dare say he had little fear of the 



94 MEMORIES AND , PORTRAITS 

ordeal ; so he had all the sheep upon his farm into 
one large park, and turned John's dog into their 
midst. The hairy man of business knew his er- 
rand well ; he knew that John and he had bought 
two sheep and (to their shame) lost them about 
Boroughmuirhead ; he knew besides (the Lord 
knows how, unless by listening) that they were 
come to Braid for their recovery; and without 
pause or blunder singled out, first one and then 
another, the two waifs. It was that afternoon the 
forty pounds were offered and refused. And the 
shepherd and his dog — what do I say ? the true 
shepherd and his man — set off together by Fair- 
milehead in jocund humour, and " smiled to ither " 
all tlie way home, with the two recovered ones be- 
fore them. So far, so good; but intelligence may 
be abused. The dog, as he is by little man's infe- 
rior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue ; 
and John had another collie tale of quite a differ- 
ent complexion. At the foot of the moss behind 
Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) there 
is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for 
washing sheep. John was one day lying under a 



PASTORAL 95 

bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a colHe on 
the far hihside skulking down through the deep- 
est of the heather with obtrusive steahh. He knew 
the dog ; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner 
from quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps he 
had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering 
flocks to market. But what did the practitioner so 
far from home? and why this guilty and secret 
manoeuvring towards the pool ? — for it was to- 
wards the pool that he was heading. John lay the 
closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog 
come forth upon the margin, look all about to see 
if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeat- 
edly wash himself over head and ears, and then 
(but now openly and with tail in air) strike home- 
ward over the hills. That same night word was 
sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken 
up from where he lay, all innocence before the fire, 
was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for 
alas ! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, 
a sheep-eater; and it was from the maculation of 
sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse 
himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. 



96 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

A trade that touches nature, one that hes at the 
foundations of Hfe, in which we have all had an- 
cestors employed, so that on a hint of it ancestral 
memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal 
or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone 
in the skill of him that writes, but as much, per- 
haps, in the inherited experience of him who reads ; 
and when I hear with a particular thrill of things 
that I have never done or seen, it is one of that in- 
numerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past 
deeds. Thus novels begin to toucli not the fine 
dilettanti but the gross mass of mankind, when 
they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of 
manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin 
to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death, 
or child-birth; and thus ancient out-door crafts 
and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the 
shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the 
scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood 
wnth epic. These aged things have on them the 
dew of man's morning ; they lie near, not so much 
to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk 
and aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand 



PASTORAL 97 

interests spring up in the process of the ages, and 
a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or 
a lost art which was once the fashion of an em- 
pire; and those only are perennial matters that 
rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all epochs 
of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed 
of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known 
to set before the best : a certain low-browed, hairy 
gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, 
next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom 
I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant 
afternoon, to munch his berries — his wife, that 
accomplished lady, squatting by his side : his name 
I never heard, but he is often described as Probably 
Arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each 
has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all 
sits Probably Arboreal ; in all our veins there 
run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; 
our civilised nerves still tingle with his rude ter- 
rors and pleasures; and to that which would have 
moved our common ancestor, all must obediently 
thrill. 

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds.; 

7 



98 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and it may be I had one for an ascendant who 
has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe my 
taste for that hillside business rather to the art 
and interest of John Todd. He it was that made it 
live for me, as the artist can make all things live. 
It was through him the simple strategy of massing 
sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant 
scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was 
an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that 
I never weary of recalling to mind : the shadow 
of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable 
black blots of snow shower moving here and there 
like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep 
and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter 
air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings 
of the wind along the moors ; and for centre piece 
to all these features and influences, John winding 
up the brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all sides, 
and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bel- 
lowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. 
It is thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, 
perched on a hump of the declivity not far from 
Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice 



PASTORAL gg 

taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to 
the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat 
back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch 
of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even 
conversation. 



VII. THE MANSE 

I HAVE named, among many rivers that 
make music in my memory, that dirty Water 
of Leith. Often and often I desire to look 
upon it again; and the choice of a point of view 
is easy to me. It should be at a certain water- 
door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there 
dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just 
below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the 
sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of 
gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the 
borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, 
tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black 
heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded 
froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and 
fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was 
young; for change, and the masons, and the 
pruning-knife have been busy; and if I could hope 
to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many 



THE MANSE loi 

and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well 
as the point of view, a certain moment in my 
growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, and 
the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to 
climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, 
where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I 
must choose the season also, so that the valley may 
be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs 
of birds ; — and the year of grace, so that when 
I turn to leave the river-side I may find the old 
manse and its inhabitants unchanged. 

It was a place in that time like no other: the 
garden cut into provinces by a great hedge of 
beech, and overlooked by the church and the ter- 
race of the churchyard, where the tombstones were 
thick, and after nightfall '' spunkies " might be 
seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots 
lying warm in sunshine ; laurels and the great yew 
making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the 
smell of water rising from all round, with an added 
tang of paper-mills; the sound of water every- 
where, and the sound of mills — the wheel and the 
dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on 



I02 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

every bush and from every corner of the overhang- 
ing woods peahng out their notes until the air 
throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the 
manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish 
stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, 
it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet so con- 
venient, and, standing where it did, it is difticult 
to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large 
family of stalwart sons and tall daughters was 
housed and reared, and came to man- and woman- 
hood in that nest of little chambers; so that the 
face of the earth was peppered with the children of 
the manse, and letters wuth outlandish stamps be- 
came familiar to the local postman, and the walls of 
the little chambers brightened with the wonders of 
the East. The dullest could see this was a house 
that had a pair of hands in divers foreign places : 
a well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt on 
by many travellers. 

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd 
of men. I read him, judging with older criticism 
the report of childish observation, as a man of sin- 
gular simplicity of nature ; unemotional, and hating 



THE MANSE 103 

the display of what he felt; standing contented 
on the old ways; a lover of his life and innocent 
habits to the end. We children admired him : 
partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for 
none more than children are concerned for beauty 
and, above all, for beauty in the old ; partly for the 
solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, 
the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But 
his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, 
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed 
us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat 
much alone, writing sermons or letters to his scat- 
tered family in a dark and cold room with a library 
of bloodless books — or so they seemed in those 
days, although I have some of them now on my 
own shelves and like well enough to read them ; and 
these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater 
gloom for our imaginations. But the study had 
a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily 
coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict 
(for I have no such passions now) the greed with 
which I beheld them ; and when I was once sent 
in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, 



I04 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time 

glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might 

reward me with an Indian picture. 

" Thy foot He '11 not let slide, nor will 
He slumber that thee keeps," 

it ran : a strange conglomerate of the unpro- 
nounceable, a sad model to set in childhood before 
one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task 
in recitation that really merited reward. And I 
must suppose the old man thought so too, and was 
either touched or amused by the performance ; for 
he took me in his arms with most unwonted tender- 
ness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly 
sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we 
were clerk and parson. I was struck by this re- 
ception into so tender a surprise that I forgot my 
disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of 
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and 
with no design upon reality. Nothing was more 
unlikely than that my grandfather should strip 
himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and re- 
minders of his absent sons ; nothing more unlikely 
than that he should bestow it upon me. He had 



THE MANSE 105 

no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my 
aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered 
under the rod in the last century; and his ways 
were still Spartan for the young. The last word 
I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He 
had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and 
was now near the end of his many days. He sat 
by the dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale 
face, and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; 
and my aunt had given him a dose of our good 
old Scotch medicine, Dr. Gregory's powder. Now 
that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob 
Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for 
the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the 
palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a 
wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with 
perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a 
" barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having 
the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me 
share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I had 
had no Gregory; then I should have no barley- 
sugar kiss : so he decided with a touch of irritation. 
And just then the phaeton coming opportunely to 



io6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the kitchen door — for such was our unlordly 
fashion — I was taken for the last time from the 
presence of my grandfather. 

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from 
this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that 
he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, 
though I never heard it maintained that either of 
us loved to hear them. He sought health in his 
youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it 
in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and 
kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great 
lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have 
been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare 
also, and am persuaded I can read him well, 
though I own I never have been told so. He made 
embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in 
that kind of work I never made anything but a 
kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter 
of knitting, which was as black as the chimney 
before I had done with it. He loved port, and 
nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed 
better with my grandfather, which seems to me 
a breach of contract. He had chalk-stones in his 



THE MANSE 107 

fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly 
inherit, but I would much rather have inherited 
his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join 
myself on with the reverend doctor; and all the 
while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, 
he moves in my blood, and whispers words to 
me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre 
of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I 
learned the love of mills — or had I an ancestor 
a miller ? — and a kindness for the neighbourhood 
of graves, as homely things not without their 
poetry — or had I an ancestor a sexton ? But what 
of the garden where he played himself? — for that, 
too, was a scene of my education. Some part of 
me played there in the eighteenth century, and ran 
races under the green avenue at Pilrig; some part 
of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a 
country place, and sat on the High School benches, 
and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The 
house where I spent my youth was not yet thought 
upon; but we made holiday parties among the 
cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and 
cream near by at a gardener's. All this I had 



io8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and 
once reminded me. I have forgotten, too, how 
we grew up, and took orders, and went to our 
first Ayrshire parish, and feh in love with and 
married a daughter of Burns's Dr. Smith — 
" Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have 
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard 
stories of Burns at first hand. 

And there is a thing stranger than all that; 
for this homiinculus or part-man of mine that 
walked about the eighteenth century with Dr. Bal- 
four in his youth, was in the way of meeting other 
homiinculos or part-men, in the persons of my other 
ancestors. These were of a lower order, and doubt- 
less we looked down upon them duly. But as I 
went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen 
the lamp and oil man taking down the shutters 
from his shop beside the Tron ; — we may have 
had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by 
a certain carpenter in I know not what wynd of 
the old, smoky city ; or, upon some holiday excur- 
sion, we may have looked into the windows of a 
cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver 



THE MANSE 109 

plying his shuttle. And these were all kinsmen 
of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes 
of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn 
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon 
us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this 
would cross the mind of the young student, as he 
posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, 
in that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still 
unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that 
he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil 
man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural 
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, 
should have a grandson ; and that these two, in the 
fulness of time, should wed; and some portion of 
that student himself should survive yet a year or 
two longer in the person of their child. 

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even 
the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief rec- 
ommendation of long pedigrees, that we can fol- 
low backward the careers of our homunculi and 
be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious 
years are but a moment in the history of the ele- 
ments that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and 



no MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. 
And though to-day I am only a man of letters, 
either tradition errs or I was present when there 
landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon, 
to tend the health and the beard of the great Car- 
dinal Beaton ; I have shaken a spear in the Debat- 
able Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; 
I was present when a skipper, plying from Dundee, 
smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was 
in a West India merchant's office, perhaps next 
door to Bailie Nichol Jarvie's, and managed the 
business of a plantation in St. Kitt's ; I was with 
my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the 
lamp and oil man) when he sailed north about 
Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the 
Pirate and the Lord of the Isles; I was with him, 
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the Smea- 
ton had drifted from her moorings, and the Aber- 
deen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only 
boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before 
his tongue could utter audible words ; and once 
more Avith him when the Bell Rock beacon took 
a '' thrawe," and his workmen fled into the tower, 



THE MANSE iii 

then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading 
in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one after 
another slunk back with confusion of countenance 
to their engineer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, 
and met adventures, and sometimes met them well. 
And away in the still cloudier past, the threads 
that make me up can be traced by fancy into the 
bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants : 
Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and 
highly preferable) system of descent by females, 
fleers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers 
in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldaean 
plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this 
that fancy can see peering through the disparted 
branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what 
muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Prob- 
ably arboreal in his habits. . . . 

And I know not which is the more strange, that 
I should carry about with me some fibres of my 
minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in 
his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentle- 
man, there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood 
that was not his; tree-top memories, like unde- 



112 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

veloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree- 
top instincts awoke and were trod down; and 
Probably Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished 
from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the 
brain of the old divine. 



VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 

THOSE who try to be artists use, time after 
time, the matter of their recollections, 
setting and resetting little coloured mem- 
ories of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) 
some especial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, 
and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to 
be done, on the playground of their youth. But 
the memories are a fairy gift which cannot be 
worn out in using. After a dozen services in 
various tales, the little sunbright pictures of the 
past still shine in the mind's eye with not a linea- 
ment defaced, not a tint impaired. Gliick iind 
Ungluck wird Gcsang, if Goethe pleases ; yet only 
by endless avatars, the original re-embodying after 
each. So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder 
at the perdurable life of these impressions ; begins, 
perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them when he 

weaves them in with fiction; and looking back on 

8 



114 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at 
last, substantive jewels, in a setting of their own. 
VOne or two of these pleasant spectres I think I 
have laid. I used one but the other day: a little 
eyot of dense, fresh-water sand, where I once waded 
deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of 
the river on both sides, and to tell myself that I 
was indeed and at last upon an island. Two of 
my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening 
to the shearers at work in river-side fields and to 
the drums of the grey old garrison upon the neigh- 
bouring hill. And this was, I think, done rightly: 
the place was rightly peopled — and now belongs 
not to me but to my puppets — ■ for a time at least. 
In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint; the 
original memory swim up instant as ever; and I 
shall once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy 
isle in Allan Water as it is in nature, and the child 
(that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; 
and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of 
that memory ; and be pricked again, in season and 
out of season, by the desire to weave it into art. 
There is another isle in my collection, the mem- 



MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 115 

ory of which besieges me. I put a whole family 
there, in one of my tales ; and later on, threw upon 
its shores, and condemned to several days of rain 
and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of 
another. The ink is not yet faded; the sound of 
the sentences is still in my mind's ear; and I am 
under a spell to write of that island again. 

I 

Tpie little isle of Earraid lies close in to the 
south-west corner of the Ross of Mull : the sound 
of lona on one side, across wdiich you may see the 
isle and church of Columba ; the open sea to the 
other, where you shall be able to mark, on a clear, 
surfy day, the breakers running white on many 
sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember 
seeing it, framed in the round bulFs-eye of a 
cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores 
like the waters of a lake, the colourless, clear light 
of the early morning making plain its heathery 
and rocky hummocks. There stood upon it, in 
these days, a single rude house of uncemented 
stones, approached by a pier of wreckwood. It 



ii6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

must have been very early, for it was then summer, 
and in summer,; in that latitude, day scarcely with- 
draws; but even at that hour the house was mak- 
ing a sweet smoke of peats which came to me over 
the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the 
cotter were wading by the pier. The same day 
we visited the shores of the isle in the ship's boats ; 
rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we 
went, and having taken stock of all possible ac- 
commodations, pitched on the northern inlet as 
the scene of operations. For it was no accident 
that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor 
in the Bay of'Earraid. Fifteen miles away to 
seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by 
the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. 
Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, 
for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock was 
small, and hard of access, and far from land, the 
work would be one of years; and my father was 
now looking for a shore station, where the stones 
might be quarried and dressed, the men live, and 
the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at 
anchor. 



MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 117 

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an 
lona lugger, Sam Bough and I sitting there cheek 
by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a 
beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And be- 
hold! there was now a pier of stone, there were 
rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street 
of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, 
wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the 
courses of the tower were put together experi- 
mentally, and behind the settlement a great gash 
in the hillside where granite was quarried. In the 
bay, the steamer lay at her moorings. All day 
long there hung about the place the music of chink- 
ing tools; and even in the dead of night, the 
watchman carried his lantern to and fro in the 
dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any 
midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see 
Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of the 
tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All 
about the green compound men would be saunter- 
ing in their Sunday's best, walking with those lax 
joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, 
talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or 



ii8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

hearkening to the waiHng of the gulls. And it 
was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as 
they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner 
reading at a table, and the congregation perched 
about in the double tier of sleeping bunks ; and to 
hear the singing of the psalms, " the chapters," 
the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, 
eloquent lighthouse prayer. 

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill 
the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, 
there would be a sound of preparation in the 
very early morning; and before the sun had risen 
from behind Ben More, the tender would steam 
out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the great 
blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trail- 
ing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone-lighters. 
The open ocean widened upon either board, and 
the hills of the mainland began to go down on the 
horizon, before she came to her unhomely destina- 
tion, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its 
black head above the swell, with the tall iron 
barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, 
and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke 



MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 119 

of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly- 
reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant 
assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about 
which a child might play for a whole summer with- 
out weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerry- 
vore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely 
bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive 
in every crevice with a dingy insect between a 
slater and a bug. No other life was there but 
that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here 
ran like a mill-race, and growled about the outer 
reef for ever, and ever and again, in the calmest 
weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. 
Times were different upon Dhu Heartach when it 
blew, and the night fell dark, and the neighbour 
lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched 
in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their 
iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing 
of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their sea- 
beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in 
anxious faces when some greater billow struck the 
barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under 
the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, 



I20 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his 
rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get his 
fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid 
the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine 
only that I saw Dhu Heartach ; and it was in sun- 
shine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that 
the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an 
enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of 
their deck cargo, riding in her wake more quietly; 
and the steersman upon each, as she rose on the 
long swell, standing tall and dark against the 

shining west. 

II 

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted 
chiefly. The lighthouse settlement scarce en- 
croached beyond its fences; over the top of the 
first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all 
shut out, the face of things unchanged by any of 
man's doings. Here was no living presence, save 
for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, grey, 
rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny 
den betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and 
the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; 



MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 121 

it was found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring 
Norsemen, and Columba's priests. The earthy 
savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the 
boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the 
air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows 
among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up 
of a great run of dashilig surf along the sea-front 
of the isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors 
must have seen and felt with scarce a difference. 
I steeped myself in open air and in past ages. 

" Delightful would it be to me to be in Uchd Ailiutt 

On the pinnacle of a rock, 
That I might often see 

The face of the ocean ; 
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds, 

Source of happiness ; 
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves 

Upon the rocks : 
At times at work without compulsion — 

This would be delightful ; 
At times plucking dulse from the rocks ; 

At times at fishing." 

So, about the next island of lona, sang Columba 
himself twelve hundred years before. And so 
might I have sung of Earraid. 



122 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

And all the while I was aware that this life of 
sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me but a holi- 
day. In that year cannon were roaring for days 
together on French battlefields; and I would sit 
in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) 
and think upon the war, and the loudness of these 
far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds, 
and the weariness of their marching. And I would 
think too of that other war which is as old as 
mankind, and is indeed the life of man: the un- 
sparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; 
the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, pre- 
carious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor 
rewards. It was a long look forward; the future 
summoned me as with trumpet calls, it warned me 
back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching; 
and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, 
like a childish bather on the beach. 

There was another young man on Earrald in 
these days, and we were much together, bathing, 
clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat 
and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools 
of the roost. But the most part of the time 



MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 123 

we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our 
futures; wondering together what should there 
befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our 
own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As 
far, and as hard, as it seemed then to look forward 
to the grave, so far it seems now to look backward 
upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that 
loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with 
which we stooped our necks under the yoke of 
destiny. I met my old companion but the other 
day ; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking ; 
but, upon my part, I was wondering to see us 
both so much at home, and so composed and 
sedentary in the world; and how much we had 
gained, and how much we had lost, to attain to 
that composure; and which had been upon the 
whole our best estate: when we sat there prating 
sensibly like men of some experience, or when we 
shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a 
western islet. 



IX. THOMAS STEVENSON 

CIVIL ENGINEER 

THE death of Thomas Stevenson will 
mean not very much to the general 
reader. His service to mankind took on 
forms of which the public knows little and under- 
stands less. He came seldom to London, and then 
only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a 
convinced provincial ; putting up for years at the 
same hotel where his father had gone before him; 
faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same 
church, and the same theatre, chosen simply for 
propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out. He 
had a circle of his own, indeed, at home ; few men 
were more beloved in Edinburgh, where he 
breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever 
he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking- 
rooms, his strange, humourous vein of talk, and 
his transparent honesty, raised him up friends and 
admirers. But to the general public and the world 



THOMAS STEVENSON 125 

of London, except about the parliamentary com- 
mittee-rooms, he remained unknown. All the time, 
his lights were in every part of the world, guiding 
the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers 
to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese 
Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was a world 
centre for that branch of applied science; in Ger- 
many, he had been called " the Nestor of lighthouse 
illumination " ; even in France, where his claims 
were long denied, he was at last, on the occasion 
of the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. 
And to show by one instance the inverted nature of 
his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet 
filling the world, a friend of mine was this winter 
on a visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a 
Peruvian if he '' knew Mr. Stevenson the author, 
because his works were much esteemed in Peru." 
My friend supposed the reference was to the writer 
of tales; but the Peruvian had never heard of 
Dr. Jekyll; what he had in his eye, what was es- 
teemed in Peru, were the volumes of the engineer. 

Thomas Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 
the year 18 18, the grandson of Thomas Smith, 



126 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son 
of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; 
so that his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, 
joined with him at the time of his death in the 
engineership, is the sixth of the family who has 
held, successively or conjointly, that office. The 
Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was finished 
before he was born; but he served under his 
brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the 
noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and, in con- 
junction with his brother David, he added two — 
the Chickens and Dhu Heartach — to that small 
number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean. 
Of shore lights, the two brothers last named 
erected no fewer than twenty-seven; of beacons,^ 
about twenty-five. Many harbours were success- 
fully carried out : one, the harbour of Wick, the chief 
disaster of my father's life, was a failure ; the sea 
proved too strong for man's arts; and after expe- 
dients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale hyper- 
cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now 

1 In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a 
flaw sub voce Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may 
be defined as " a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted." 



THOMAS STEVENSON 127 

stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten 
miles from John-o'-Groat's. In the improvement 
of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way 
of practice over both England and Scotland, nor 
had any British engineer anything approaching their 
experience. 

It w^as about this nucleus of his professional 
labours that all my father's scientific inquiries and 
inventions centred; these proceeded from, and 
acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was 
as a harbour engineer that he became interested 
in the propagation and reduction of waves ; a dif- 
ficult subject in regard to which he has left behind 
him much suggestive matter and some valuable 
approximate results. Storms were his sworn ad- 
versaries, and it was through the study of storms 
that he approached that of meteorology at large. 
Many who knew him not otherwise, knew — 
perhaps have in their gardens — his louvre- 
boarded screen for instruments. But the great 
achievement of his life was, of course, in optics as 
applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had 
done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light 



128 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

apparatus on a principle that still seems unimprov- 
able; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and 
brought to a comparable perfection the revolving 
light, a not unnatural jealousy and much painful 
controversy rose in France. It had its hour; and, 
as I have told already, even in France it has blown 
by. Had it not, it would have mattered the less, 
since all through his life my father continued to 
justify his claim by fresh advances. New appara- 
tus for lights in new situations was continually 
being designed with the same unwearied search 
after perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means ; 
and though the loolopliotal revolving light perhaps 
still remains his most elegant contrivance, it is 
difficult to give it the palm over the much later 
condensing system, with its thousand possible 
modifications. The number and the value of these 
improvements entitle their author to the name of 
one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the 
world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two 
things must be said : and, first, that Thomas Steven- 
son was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, 
a sentiment of optical laws, and a great intensity 



THOMAS STEVENSON 129 

of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to 
calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments 
he had conceived was often beyond him, and he 
must fall back on the help of others, notably on 
that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend, 
emeritus Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his 
later friend, Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious 
enough circumstance, and a great encouragement to 
others, that a man so ill equipped should have suc- 
ceeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks 
of applied science. The second remark is one that 
applies to the whole family, and only particularly 
to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and 
importance of his inventions: holding as the 
Stevensons did a Government appointment, they 
regarded their original work as something due al- 
ready to the nation, and none of them has ever 
taken out a- patent. It is another cause of the com- 
parative obscurity of the name: for a patent not 
only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputa- 
tion; and my father's instruments enter anony- 
mously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed 
anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the 



ijo MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

least considerable patent would stand out and tell 
its author's story. 

But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains ; 
what we have lost, what we now rather try to 
recall, is the friend and companion. He was a 
man of a somewhat antique strain : with a blended 
sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and 
at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound 
essential melancholy of disposition and (what often 
accompanies it) the most humourous geniality in 
company; shrewd and childish; passionately at- 
tached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many 
extremes, many faults of temper, and no very 
stable foothold for himself among life's troubles. 
Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these 
not inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. 
" I sat at his feet," writes one of these, " when I 
asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set 
in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I 
always knew that no man could add to the worth of 
the conclusion." He had excellent taste, though 
whimsical and partial ; collected old furniture and 
delighted specially in sunflowers long before the 



THOMAS STEVENSON 131 

days of Mr. Wilde ; took a lasting pleasure in prints 
and pictures; was a devout admirer of Thomson 
of Duddingston at a time when few shared the 
taste; and though he read little, was constant to 
his favourite books. He had never any Greek; 
Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had 
left school, where he was a mere consistent idler: 
happily, I say, for Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardi- 
nal Bona were his chief authors. The first he must 
have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keep- 
ing it near him in his study, and carrying it in his 
bag on journeys. Another old theologian, Brown 
of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he 
was indisposed, he had two books, Guy Mannering 
and The Parent's Assistant, of which he never 
wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or as he 
preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far 
as his views were modified by a hot-headed chival- 
rous sentiment for women. He was actually in 
favour of a marriage law under which any woman 
might have a divorce for the asking, and no man 
on any ground whatever; and the same sentiment 
found another expression in a Magdalen Mission 



132 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

in Edinburgh, founded and largely supported by 
himself. This was but one of the many channels 
of his public generosity; his private was equally 
unstrained. The Church of Scotland, of which he 
held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) 
and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited 
often by his time and money; and though, from a 
morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would 
never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice was 
often sought, and he served the Church on many 
committees. What he perhaps valued highest in 
his work were his contributions to the defence 
of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was 
praised by Hutchinson Stirling and reprinted at 
the request of Professor Crawford. 

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called 
morbid; morbid, too, were his sense of the fleet- 
ingness of life and his concern for death. He had 
never accepted the conditions of man's life or his 
own character; and his inmost thoughts were ever 
tinged with the Celtic melancholy. Cases of con- 
science were sometimes grievous to him, and that 
delicate employment of a scientific witness cost him 



THOMAS STEVENSON 133 

many qualms. But he found respite from these 
troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong 
study of natural science, in the society of those he 
loved, and in his daily walks, which now would 
carry him far into the country with some congenial 
friend, and now keep him dangling about the town 
from one old book-shop to another, and scraping 
romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed. 
His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense 
and so much freakish humour, and clothed in lan- 
guage so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a perpetual 
delight to all who knew him before the clouds 
began to settle on his mind. His use of language 
was both just and picturesque; and when at the 
beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing 
of this power, it was strange and painful to hear 
him reject one word after another as inadequate, 
and at length desist from the search and leave his 
phrase unfinished rather than finish it without pro- 
priety. It was perhaps another Celtic trait that his 
affections and emotions, passionate as these were, 
and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the 
most elocjuent expression both in words and ges- 



134 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

tures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through 
him and broke forth in imagery, hke what we read 
of Southern races. For all these emotional ex- 
tremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of 
his character, he had upon the whole a happy life ; 
nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at 
the last came to him unaware. 



X. TALK AND TALKERS 

" Sir, we had a good talk." — Johnson. 

" As we must account for every idle word, so we must for 
every idle silence." — Franklin. 



THERE can be no fairer ambition than to 
excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, 
clear, and welcome; to have a fact, a 
thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; 
and not only to cheer the flight of time among our 
intimates, but bear our part in that great inter- 
national congress, always sitting, where public 
wrongs are first declared, public errors first cor- 
rected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day 
by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure 
comes before Parliament but it has been long ago 
prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no 
book is written that has not been largely composed 
by their assistance. Literature in many of its 
branches is no other than the shadow of good talk ; 



136 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

but the imitation falls far short of the original in 
life, freedom, and effect. There are always two to 
a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience, 
and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tenta- 
tive, continually " in further search and progress " ; 
while written words remain fixed, become idols 
even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and 
preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the 
truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged 
with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction 
of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may 
call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing 
immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it 
Avould, become merely aesthetic or merely classical, 
like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn hum- 
bug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth 
out of the contemporary groove into the open 
fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like school- 
boys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we 
can learn our period and ourselves. In short, 
the first duty of a man is to speak ; that is his chief 
business in this world ; and talk, which is the har- 
monious speech of two or more, is by far the most 



TALK AND TALKERS 137 

accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money ; 
it is all profit; it completes our education, founds 
and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at 
any age and in almost any state of health. 

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest rela- 
tions are still a kind of contest; and if we would 
not forego all that is valuable in our lot, we must 
continually face some other person, eye to eye, and 
wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still 
by force of body, or power of character or intellect, 
that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and 
women contend for each other in the lists of love, 
like rival mesmerists ; the active and adroit decide 
their challenges in the sports of the body; and the 
sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All 
sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same de- 
gree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond 
between human beings is founded in or heightened 
by some element of competition. Now, the rela- 
tion that has the least root in matter is undoubt- 
edly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I 
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises 
among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene 



138 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone 
that the friends can measure strength, and en- 
joy that amicable counter-assertion of personality 
which is the gauge of relations and the sport of 
life. 

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Hu- 
mours must first be accorded in a kind of overture 
or prologue; hour, company, and circumstance be 
suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the 
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer 
out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of 
the hunter's pride, though he has all and more 
than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the 
stream of conversation as an angler follows the 
windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to 
"kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is 
rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, 
and those changing prospects of the truth that are 
the best of education. There is nothing in a sub- 
ject, so called, that we should regard it as an idolj 
or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. In- 
deed, there are few subjects ; and so far as they are 
truly talkable, more than the half of them may be 



TALK AND TALKERS 139 

reduced to three : that I am I, that you are you, and 
that there are other people dimly understood to be 
not quite the same as either. Wherever talk may 
range, it still runs half the time on these eternal 
lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself 
as on an instrument; asserts and justifies him- 
self; ransacks his brain for instances and opin- 
ions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own 
surprise and the admiration of his adversary. All 
natural talk is a festival of ostentation ; and by the 
laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity 
of the other. It is from that reason that we ven- 
ture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so 
warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's 
eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once 
launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordi- 
nary selves, tower up to the height of their secret 
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, 
brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most 
shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave 
for themselves with words and for awhile inhabit 
a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, 
where they fill the round of the world's dignities, 



I40 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And 
when the talk is over, each goes his way, still 
flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing 
clouds of glory; each declines from the height of 
his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow de- 
clension. I remember, in the entr'acte of an after- 
noon performance, coming forth into the sunshine, 
in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a roman- 
tic city ; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving 
in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evapo- 
rate The Flying Dutchman (for it was that I had 
been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, 
warmth, well-being, and pride; and the noises of 
the city, voices, bells, and marching feet fell to- 
gether in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. 
In the same way, the excitement of a good talk 
lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart 
still hot within you, the brain still simmering, 
and the physical earth swimming around you with 
the colours of the sunset. 

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a 
large surface of life, rather than dig mines into 
geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, 



TALK AND TALKERS 141 

incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical in- 
stances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds 
forced in and in upon the matter in hand from 
every point of the compass, and from every degree 
of mental elevation and abasement — these are the 
material with which talk is fortified, the food on 
which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is 
proper to the exercise should still be brief and 
seizing. Talk should proceed by instances ; by the 
apposite, not the expository. It should keep close 
along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and 
businesses of men, at the level where history, fic- 
tion, and experience intersect and illuminate each 
other. I am I, and You are You, with all my 
heart; but conceive how these lean propositions 
change and brighten when, instead of words, the 
actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed 
in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices 
to corroborate the story in the face. Not less sur- 
prising is the change when we leave off to speak of 
generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and 
all the characters of Theophrastus — and call up 
other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very 



142 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

trick and feature; or trading on a common know- 
ledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing 
with the hues of life. Communication is no longer 
by words, but by the instancing of whole biogra- 
phies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of 
history, in bulk. That which is understood excels 
that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike; 
ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, 
as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply 
without effort the most obscure and intricate 
thoughts. Strangers who have a large common 
ground of reading will, for this reason, come the 
sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If 
they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and 
Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, 
they can leave generalities and begin at once to 
speak by figures. 

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise 
most frequently and that embrace the widest range 
of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for their 
own sake, but only those which are most social or 
most radically human ; and even these can only be 
discussed among their devotees. A technicality 



TALK AND TALKERS 143 

is always welcome to the expert, whether in ath- 
letics, art, or law; I have heard the best kind of 
talk on technicalities from such rare and happy 
persons as both know and love their business. No 
human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 
minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear 
too much of it in literature. The weather is re- 
garded as the very nadir and scoff of conversa- 
tional topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic 
element in scenery, is far more tractable in lan- 
guage, and far more human both in import and 
suggestion than the stable features of the landscape. 
Sailors and shepherds, and the people generally of 
coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often 
excitingly presented in literature. But the ten- 
dency of all living talk draws it back and back 
into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a 
creature of the street and market-place, feeding on 
gossip ; and its last resort is still in a discussion on 
morals. That is the heroic form of gossip ; heroic 
in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip, 
because it turns on personalities. You can keep 
no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or 



144 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

theological discussion. These are to all the world 
what law is to lawyers ; they are everybody's tech- 
nicalities; the medium through which all consider 
life, and the dialect in which they express their 
judgments. I knew three young men who walked 
together daily for some two months in a solemn 
and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer 
weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, 
and yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond 
two subjects — theology and love. And perhaps 
neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines 
would have granted their premises or welcomed 
their conclusions. 

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by 
talk any more than by private thinking. That is not 
the profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above 
all in the experience; for when we reason at large 
on any subject, we review our state and history in 
life. From time to time, however, and specially, 
I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, 
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of 
knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; 
the question takes a problematical, a bafBing, yet 



TALK AND TALKERS 145 

a likely air ; the talkers begin to feel lively presenti- 
ments of some conclusion near at hand; towards 
this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his 
own path, and struggling for first utterance; and 
then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with 
a shout, and almost at the same moment the other 
is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like 
enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle 
having been wound and unwound out of words. 
But the sense of joint discovery is none the less 
giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the 
talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are 
neither few nor far apart; they are attained with 
speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by 
the nature of the process, they are always worthily 
shared. 

There is a certain attitude, combative at once 
and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to 
quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. 
It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but 
a certain proportion of all of these that I love to 
encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must 
not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen 



146 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

questing after elements of truth. Neither must 
they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers 
with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal 
terms. We must reach some solution, some 
shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk 
becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach 
it cheaply, or' quickly, or without the tussle and 
effort wherein pleasure lies. 

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I 
shall call Spring-Heel'd Jack. I say so, because 
I never knew any one who mingled so largely the 
possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish 
proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a 
salad, is a madman to mix it : Jack is that madman. 
I know not which is more remarkable; the in- 
sane lucidity of his conclusions, the humourous 
eloquence of his language, or his power of 
method, bringing the whole of life into the focus 
of the subject treated, mixing the conversational 
salad like a drunken, god. He doubles like the 
serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kalei- 
doscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of 
others, and 'so, in the twinkling of an eye and 



TALK AND TALKERS 147 

with a heady rapture, turns questions inside 
out and flings them empty before you on the 
ground, hke a triumphant conjuror. It is my 
common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles 
me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such 
grossness, such partiahty, and such wearing itera- 
tion, as at length shall spur him upMn its defence. 
In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required 
character, and with moonstruck philosophy justi- 
fies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to 
compare with the vim of these impersonations, the 
strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare 
to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell — 

" As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
Out of an instrument — " 

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd 
irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, 
humour, eloquence, and bathos, each startling in 
its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired dis- 
order of their combination. A talker of a differ- 
ent calibre, though belonging to the same school, 
is Burly. Burly is a man of a great presence; he 
commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impres- 



148 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

sion of a grosser mass of character than most men. 
It has been said of him that his presence could be 
felt in a room you entered blindfold ; and the same, 
I think, has been said of other powerful constitu- 
tions condemned to much physical inaction. There 
is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's man- 
ner of talk which suits well enough with this im- 
pression. He will roar you down, he w^ill bury his 
face in his hands, he will undergo passions of 
revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of 
mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and 
after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and the welkin 
rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain 
subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agree- 
ment issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a 
glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only 
serves to make your final union the more unex- 
pected and precious. Throughout there has been 
perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to 
hear although not always to listen, and an un- 
affected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, 
with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate 
with Spring-IIeerd Jack; who may at any moment 



TALK AND TALKERS 149 

turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, 
create for you a view you never held, and then 
furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at 
least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, 
copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I 
myself am in the same category; for if we love 
talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, 
who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much 
our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give 
us our full measure of the dust and exertion of 
battle. Both these men can be beat from a posi- 
tion, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and 
hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you 
can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, 
with people, scenery, and manners of its own ; live 
a life apart, more arduous, active, and glowing 
than any real existence; and come forth again 
when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a 
dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the 
chimney-pots of the old battered city still around 
you. Jack has the far finer mind. Burly the far 
more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, 
Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the 



150 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

one glances high hke a meteor and makes a Hght 
in darkness; the other, with many changing hues 
of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; 
but both have the same humour and artistic in- 
terests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, 
the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of 
contradiction. 

Cockshot ^ is a different article, but vastly enter- 
taining, and has been meat and drink to me for 
many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, 
and pertinacious, and the choice of words not 
much. The point about him is his extraordinary 
readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing 
but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or 
will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed 
to lay its timbers and launch it in your presence. 
" Let me see," he will say. " Give me a moment. 
I should have some theory for that." A blither 
spectacle than the vigour with wdiich he sets about 
the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed 
by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for 
his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a 

1 The late Fleeming Jenkin. 



TALK AND TALKERS 151 

horseshoe, with a visible and hvely effort. He 
has, in theorising, a compass, an art ; what I would 
call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert 
Spencer, who should see the fun of the thing. You 
are not bound, and no more is he, to place your 
faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of 
them are right enough, durable even for life; and 
the poorest serve for a cock-shy — as when idle 
people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and 
have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever 
they are, serious opinions or humours of the mo- 
ment, he still defends his ventures with indefati- 
gable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but 
taking punishment like a man. He knows and 
never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the 
sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to 
use the old slang, like a thorough *' glutton," and 
honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. 
Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe 
of sleep. Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a 
victim. His talk is like the driest of all imagi- 
nable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and in- 
imitable quickness are the qualities by which he 



152 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

lives. Athelred, on the other hand, presents you 
with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow 
nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready 
man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You 
may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory 
jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps 
fail to throw it in the end. And there is something 
singularly engaging, often instructive, in the sim- 
plicity with which he thus exposes the process as 
well as the result, the works as well as the dial of 
the clock. Withal he has his hours of inspiration. 
Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, 
coming from deeper down, they smack the more 
personally, they have the more of fine old crusted 
humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There 
are sayings of his in which he has stamped him- 
self into the very grain of the language; you 
would think he must have worn the words next 
his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a 
sayer of particular good things that Athelred is 
most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart wood- 
man of thought. I have pulled on a light cord 
often enough, while he has been wielding the 



TALK AND TALKERS 153 

broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal divi- 
sion, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have 
known him to battle the same question night after 
night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, 
constantly applying it and re-applying it to life 
with humourous or grave intention, and all the 
while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an 
unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given 
moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, 
can be more radiantly just to those from whom 
he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is 
even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge 
excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over 
the w^elter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, 
and still faithfully contending with his doubts. 

Both the last talkers deal much in points of con- 
duct and religion studied in the " dry light " of 
prose. Indirectly and as if against his will the 
same elements from time to time appear in the 
troubled and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various 
and exotic knowledge, complete although unready 
sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of 
language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; 



154 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me — 
proxime accessit, I should say. He sings the 
praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and 
jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenad- 
ing manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom 
comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, 
indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But 
even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he 
still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jar- 
ring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Hora- 
tian humours. His mirth has something of the 
tragedy of the world for its perpetual background ; 
and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double or- 
chestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one 
pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly 
reconciled either with life or with himself; and 
this instant war in his members sometimes divides 
the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps 
not often, frankly surrender himself in conversa- 
tion. He brings into the talk other thoughts than 
those which he expresses; you are conscious that 
he keeps an eye on something else, that he does 
not shake off the world, nor quite forget himself. 



TALK AND TALKERS 155 

Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an 
occasional unfairness for his companions, who find 
themselves one day giving too much, and the next, 
when they are wary out of season, giving perhaps 
too little. Purcel is in another class from any I 
have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears 
in conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct 
characters, one of which I admire and fear, and 
the other love. In the first, he is radiantly civil 
and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, 
and from that vantage-ground drops you his re- 
marks like favours. He seems not to share in our 
sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of inter- 
est; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of 
wit, so polished that the dull do not perceive it, 
but so right that the sensitive are silenced. True 
talk should have more body and blood, should be 
louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; 
the true talker should not hold so steady an ad- 
vantage over whom he speaks with; and that is 
one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel 
in his second character, when he unbends into a 
strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside 



156 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

kettle. In these moods he has an elegant home- 
liness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know 
another persons who attains, in his moments, to 
the insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, 
I declare, as Congreve wrote; but that is a sport 
of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for 
there is none, alas ! to give him answer. 

One last remark occurs : It is the mark of genuine 
conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted 
with their full effect beyond the circle of common 
friends. To have their proper weight they should 
appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the 
speaker. Good talk is dramatic; it is like an im- 
promptu piece of acting where each should repre- 
sent himself to the greatest advantage; and that 
is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most 
fully and candidly himself, and where, if you were 
to shift the speeches round from one to another, 
there would be the greatest loss in significance and 
perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends 
so wholly on our company. We should like to in- 
troduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir 
Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even 



TALK AND TALKERS 157 

painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of 
man, can talk to some degree with all ; but the true 
talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, 
comes only with the peculiar brethren of our 
spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitu- 
tion of our being, and is a thing to relish with 
all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be 
grateful for for ever. 



XI. TALK AND TALKERSi 

II 

IN the last paper there was perhaps too much 
about mere debate; and there was nothing 
said at all about that kind of talk which is 
merely luminous and restful, a higher power of 
silence, the quiet of the evening shared by ruminat- 
ing friends. There is something, aside from per- 
sonal preference, to be alleged in support of this 
omission. Those who are no chimney-cornerers, 
who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a 
ground in reason for their choice. They get little 
rest indeed ; but restfulness is a quality for cattle ; 
the virtues are all active, life is alert, and it is in 
repose that men prepare themselves for evil. On 
the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge 
of themselves and others ; they have in a high de- 

1 This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in The 

Spectator. 



TALK AND TALKERS 159 

gree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity displayed and 
proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, 
paying for it as they go; and once the talk is 
launched, they are assured of honest dealing from 
an adversary eager like themselves. The aborigi- 
nal man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as 
when he fought tooth and nail for roots and ber- 
ries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar ; it is 
like his old primaeval days upon the crags, a return 
to the sincerity of savage life from the comfortable 
fictions of the civilised. And if it be delightful to 
the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his 
younger brother, the conscientious gentleman. I 
feel never quite sure of your urbane and smiling 
coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in 
silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him 
on to be an ass, and send him forth again, not 
merely contemned for the moment, but radically 
more contemptible than when he entered. But if 
I have a flushed, blustering fellow^ for my oppo- 
site, bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure 
to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course 
of the debate. He will not spare me when we 



i6o MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

differ; he will not fear to demonstrate my folly to 
my face. 

For many natures there is not much charm in 
the still, chambered society, the circle of bland 
countenances, the digestive silence, the admired 
remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They 
demand more atmosphere and exercise; "3. gale 
upon their spirits," as our pious ancestors would 
phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an 
uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, 
given their character and faults, is one to be de- 
fended. The purely wise are silenced by facts ; they 
talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around 
them like a view in nature ; if they can be shown to 
be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof 
like a thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. 
They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a 
glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But 
it is not so with all. Others in conversation seek 
rather contact with their fellow-men than increase 
of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, 
not the philosophy, of life is the sphere of their in- 
tellectual activity. Even when they pursue truth, 



TALK AND TALKERS i6i 

they desire as much as possible of what we may call 
human scenery along the road they follow. They 
dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in 
their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delights 
them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind 
to all besides, their interest riveted on people, living, 
loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this 
description, the sphere of argument seems very 
pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a per- 
turbed countenance, floods of tears, an insult 
which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is 
brought round to knowledge which no syllogism 
would have conveyed to him. His own experience 
is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious of him- 
self, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector 
and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose 
his hold on the soberness of things and take him- 
self in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such an 
one the very way of moral ruin ; the school where 
he might learn to be at once intolerable and 
ridiculous. 

This character is perhaps commoner than philos- 
ophers suppose. And for persons of that stamp 



i62 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

to learn much by conversation, they must speak 
with their superiors, not in inteUect, for that is a 
superiority that must be proved, but in station. 
If they cannot find a friend to bully them for their 
good, they must find either an old man, a woman, 
or some one so far below them in the artificial 
order of society, that courtesy may be particularly 
exercised. 

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our 
mouths are always partly closed ; we must swallow 
our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our 
heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to 
our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, 
a touch of something different in their manner — 
which is freer and rounder, if they come of what 
is called a good family, and often more timid and 
precise if they are of the middle class — serves, 
in these days, to accentuate the difference of age 
and add a distinction to grey hairs. But their 
superiority is founded more deeply than by out- 
ward marks or gestures. They are before us in 
the march of man ; they have more or less solved 
the irking problem ; they have battled through the 



TALK AND TALKERS 163 

equinox of life; in good and evil they have held 
their course; and now, without open shame, they 
near the crown and harbour. It may be we have 
been struck with one of fortune's darts; we can 
scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet 
long before we were so much as thought upon, the 
like calamity befell the old man or woman that 
now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our 
inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening 
of man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We 
grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and 
coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; we see life 
in aerial perspective, under the heavens of faith; 
and out of the worst, in the mere presence of con- 
tented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear 
shrinks before them " like a thing reproved," not 
the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the 
instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and 
revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; 
they report lions in the path ; they counsel a meticu- 
lous footing; but their serene, marred faces are 
more eloquent and tell another story. Where they 
have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing ; 



164 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

what they have endured unbroken, we also, God 
helping us, will make a shift to bear. 

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself 
remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, 
wisdom's simples, plain considerations overlooked 
by youth. They have matter to communicate, be 
they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely 
literature, it is great literature ; classic in virtue of 
the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of 
travel, with things we should not otherwise have 
learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's de- 
tachment, — and this is why, of two old men, the 
one who is not your father speaks to you with the 
more sensible authority ; for in the paternal relation 
the oldest have lively interests and remain still 
young. Thus I have known two young men great 
friends; each swore by the other's father; the 
father of each swore by the other lad; and yet 
each pair of parent and child were perpetually by 
the ears. This is typical : it reads like the germ of 
some kindly comedy. 

The old appear in conversation in two characters : 
the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. 



TALK AND TALKERS 165 

The l^st is perhaps what we look for ; it is p^r-^. 
haps the- more instructive. An old gentleman, well 
on in yeai^s, sits handsomely and naturally in 
the bow-window of his age, scanning experience 
with reverted eye ; and chirping and smiling, com- 
municates the accidents and reads the lesson o£ 
his long career. Opinions are strengthened, indeed, 
but they are also weeded out in the course of years. 
What remains steadily present to the eye of the 
retired veteran in his hermitage, what still min- 
isters to his content, what still quickens his old 
honest heart — these are " the real long-lived 
things " that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where 
youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wis- 
dom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds 
his heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded 
teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have 
known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for 
he is now gathered to his stock — Robert Hunter, 
Sheriff of Dunbarton, and author of an excellent 
law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether 
he was originally big or little is more than I can 
guess. When I knew him he was all fallen away 



i66 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and fallen in ; crooked and shrunken ; buckled into 
a stiff waistcoat for support ; troubled by ailments, 
which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; 
one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not for decep- 
tion, on his head; close shaved, except under his 
chin — and for that he never failed to apologise, 
for it went sore against the traditions of his life. 
You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by 
Miss Mather ; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived 
to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in 
man, brimming with human kindness, and staunch 
as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. 
You could not say that he had lost his memory, 
for he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and 
Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; 
but the parchment was filled up, there was no room 
for fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of re- 
peating the same anecdote on many successive visits. 
His voice survived in its full power, and he took 
a pride in using it. On his last voyage as Commis- 
sioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and 
made himself clearly audible without a speaking- 
trumpet, ruffling the while with a proper vanity in 



TALK AND TALKERS 167 

his achievement. He had a habit of eking out his 
words with interrogative hems, which was puzzhng 
and a httle wearisome, suited ill with his appear- 
ance, and seemed a survival from some former 
stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was 
a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, 
he may have pointed with these minute guns his 
allocutions to the bench. His humour was perfectly 
equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheu- 
matism, stone, and gravel might have combined 
their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when I 
came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside 
Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ and greet me with 
the same open brow, the same kind formality of 
manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the 
man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under 
his mother's influence, as an admirer of Junius, but 
on maturer knowledge had transferred his admi- 
ration to Burke. He cautioned me, w^ith entire 
gravity, to be punctilious in writing English ; never 
to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was 
a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the col- 
loquial, I should certainly be shamed : the remark 



i68 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David 
Hume. Scott was too new for him ; he had known 
the autlior — known him, too, for a Tory ; and 
to the genuine classic a contemporary is always 
something of a trouble. He had the old, serious 
love of the play; had even, as he was proud to 
tell, played a certain part in the history of Shake- 
spearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed 
on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the 
idea of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with 
great scenic display. A moderate in religion, he 
was much struck in the last years of his life by 
a conversation with two young lads, revivalists. 
^' H'm," he would say — '' new to me. I have had 
— h'm — no such experience." It struck him, not 
with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic inter- 
est, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a Chris- 
tian of so old a standing, should hear these young 
fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons 
that he had fought the battle of life with, — 
"and — h'm — not understand." In this wise 
and graceful attitude he did justice to himself and 
others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and 



TALK AND TALKERS 169 

recognised their limits without anger or alarm. 
His last recorded remark, on the last night of his 
life, was after he had been arguing against Cal- 
vinism with his minister and was interrupted by 
an intolerable pang. " After all," he said, " of 
all the 'isms, I know none so bad as rheumatism." 
My own last sight of him was some time before, 
when we dined together at an inn ; lie had been on 
circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part 
of his existence; and I remember it as the only 
occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang 
— a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; 
and as we took our places at table, he addressed 
me with a twinkle : " We are just what you would 
call two bob." He offered me port, I remember, 
as the proper milk of youth ; spoke of " twenty- 
shilling notes " ; and throughout the meal was full 
of old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an 
ancient boy on a holiday. But what I recall chiefly 
was his confession that he had never read Othello 
to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. 
He loved nothing better than to display his know- 
ledge and memory by adducing parallel passages 



lyo MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

from Shakespeare, passages where the same word 
was employed, or the same idea differently treated. 
But Othello had beaten him. " That noble gentle- 
man and that noble lady — h'm — too painful for 
me." The same night the hoardings were covered 
with posters, " Burlesque of Othello,'' and the 
contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An 
unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's 
soul. His acquaintance was indeed a liberal and 
pious education. All the humanities were taught 
in that bare dining-room beside his gouty foot- 
stool. He was a piece of good advice ; he was him- 
self the instance that pointed and adorned his 
various talk. Nor could a young man have found 
elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, 
discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a 
life so honest and composed; a soul like an ancient 
violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a 
touch in music — as in that dining-room, with Mr. 
Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under the 
shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle. 

The second class of old people are not anec- 
dotic; they are rather hearers than talkers, listen- 



TALK AND TALKERS 171 

ing to the young with an amused and critical 
attention. To have this sort of intercourse to 
perfection, I think we must go to old ladies. Wo- 
men are better hearers than men, to begin with; 
they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the 
tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and 
we will take more from a woman than even from 
the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Bit- 
ing comment is the chief part, whether for profit 
or amusement, in this business. The old lady that 
I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her 
tongue, after years of practice, in absolute com- 
mand, whether for silence or attack. If she chance 
to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the 
malignity of age. But if you chance to please 
even slightly, you will be listened to with a par- 
ticular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time 
to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as 
heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, 
as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these 
stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the 
young. The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it 
is administered as a compliment — if you had 



ii7i2 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

:"not pleased, you would not have been censured ; it 
is a personal affair — a hyphen, a trait d' union, 
between you and your censor; age's philandering, 
for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably 
the young man feels very much of a fool; but he 
must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self-love, if 
.he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The 
correction of silence is what kills ; when you know 
you have transgressed, and your friend says noth- 
ing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of 
gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a mo- 
ment. But when the word is out, the worst is 
.over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all 
may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, 
every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with 
-a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, 
tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with 
a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repe- 
tition of the discipline. 

There are few women, not well sunned and 
ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus 
stand apart from a man and say the true thing 
with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some 



TALK AND TALKERS 173 

— and I doubt if there be any man who can return 
the compHment. The class of man represented 
by Vernon Whitford in The Egoist says, indeed, 
the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon 
is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble 
and instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his 
conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but 
we agree with him, against our consciences, when 
he remorsefully considers '' its astonishing dry- 
ness." He is the best of men, but the best of 
women manage to combine all that and something 
more. Their very faults assist them; they are 
helped even by the falseness of their position in 
life. They can retire into the fortified camp of 
the proprieties. They can touch a subject and 
suppress it. The most adroit employ a somewhat 
elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as 
they wear gloves when they shake hands. But a 
man has the full responsibility of his freedom, 
cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent with- 
out rudeness, must answer for his words upon the 
moment, and is not seldom left face to face with 
a damning choice, between the more or less dis- 



174 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

honourable wriggling of Deronda and the down- 
right woodenness of Vernon Whitford. 

But the superiority of women is perpetually 
menaced; they do not sit throned on infirmities 
like the old ; they are suitors as well as sovereigns ; 
their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt 
to follow ; and hence much of the talk between the 
sexes degenerates into something unworthy of the 
name. The desire to please, to shine with a certain 
softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture 
of oneself, banishes from conversation all that is 
sterling and most of what is humourous. As soon 
as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to 
flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the 
intellectual, and the commerce of words, consciously 
or not, becomes secondary to the commercing of 
eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is 
avoided, and a man and woman converse equally 
and honestly, something in their nature or their 
education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts 
them to agree; and where that is impossible, to 
agree to differ. Should they neglect the warning, 
at the first suspicion of an argument, they find 



TALK AND TALKERS 175 

themselves in different hemispheres. About any 
point of business or conduct, any actual affair de- 
manding settlement, a woman will speak and listen, 
hear and answer arguments, not only with natural 
wisdom, but with candour and logical honesty. 
But if the subject of debate be something in the 
air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical 
Aunt Sally, then may the male debater instantly 
abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce 
facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall 
avail him nothing; what the woman said first, 
that (unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat 
at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a 
talk between men grows brighter and quicker and 
begins to promise to bear fruit, talk between the 
sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of 
difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the 
brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant con- 
versational rockets; it is bridged by the discreet 
woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly 
forward to the nearest point of safety. And this 
sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous 
topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced with 



176 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

safety in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics 
among the true drawing-room queens. 

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; 
it is so by our choice and for our sins. The sub- 
jection of women; the ideal imposed upon them 
from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with 
so much constancy; their motherly, superior ten- 
derness to man's vanity and self-importance ; their 
managing arts — the arts of a civilised slave among 
good-natured barbarians — are all painful ingre- 
dients and all help to falsify relations. It is not 
till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene 
that genuine relations are founded, or ideas hon- 
estly compared. In the garden, on the road or the 
hillside, or tcte-a-tete and apart from interruptions, 
occasions arise when we may learn much from any 
single woman; and nowhere more often than in 
married life. Marriage is one long conversation, 
chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless ; 
they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart 
of woman prompting her at once to nail her colours 
to the mast. But in the intervals, almost uncon- 
sciously and with no desire to shine, the whole 



TALK AND TALKERS 177 

material of life is turned over and over, ideas are 
struck out and shared, the two persons more and 
more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and 
in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they 
conduct each other into new worlds of thought. 



XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

THE civilisation, the manners, and the 
morals of dog-kind are to a great extent 
subordinated to those of his ancestral 
master, man. This animal, in many ways so supe- 
rior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares 
the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the 
tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in 
India, pays small regard to the character of his 
willing client, judges him with listless glances, and 
condemns him in a byword. Listless have been the 
looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle 
terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below ex- 
aggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, 
more unintelligent has been the attitude of his ex- 
press detractors ; those who are very fond of dogs 
'' but in their proper place " ; who say '' poo' 
fellow, poo' fellow," and are themselves far poorer; 
who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 179 

oven ; who are not ashamed to admire " the crea- 
ture's instinct " ; and flying far beyond folly, have 
dared to resuscitate the theory of animal machines. 
The " dog's instinct " and the " automaton-dog/* 
in this age of psychology and science, sound like 
strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly 
is; a machine working independently of his con- 
trol, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all in 
motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in 
the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the win- 
dow and shaken by the thunder of the stones; 
an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit 
is confined: an automaton like man. Instinct 
again he certainly possesses. Inherited aptitudes 
are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at 
once views and understands, as though he were 
awakened from a sleep, as though he came " trail- 
ing clouds of glory." But with him, as with man, 
the field of instinct is limited; its utterances are 
obscure and occasional; and about the far larger 
part of life both the dog and his master must con- 
duct their steps by deduction and observation. 
The leading distinction between dog and man. 



i8o MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

after and perhaps before the different duration 
of their Hves, is that the one can speak and that 
the other cannot. The absence of the power of 
speech confines the dog in the development of his 
intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, 
for words are the beginning of metaphysic. At 
the same blow it saves him from many supersti- 
tions, and his silence has won for him a higher 
name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The 
faults of the dog are many. He is vainer than 
man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly in- 
tolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jeal- 
ous to the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid 
of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is 
passed in the manufacture and the laborious com- 
munication of falsehood ; he lies with his tail, he lies 
with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw; and 
when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door 
his purpose is other than appears. But he has 
some apology to offer for the vice. Many of the 
signs which form his dialect have come to bear an 
arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by 
his master and himself; yet when a new want 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS i8i 

arises he must either invent a new vehicle of mean- 
ing or wrest an old one to a different purpose ; and 
this necessity frequently recurring must tend to 
lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Mean- 
w^hile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and 
draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between 
formal and essential truth. Of his punning per- 
versions, his legitimate dexterity witli symbols, 
he is even vain; but when he has told and 
been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his 
body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentle- 
manly feeling theft and falsehood are disgraceful 
vices. The canine, like the human, gentleman de- 
mands in his misdemeanours Montaigne's '' je ne 
sais qiioi dc genereux." He is never more than 
half ashamed of having barked or bitten ; and for 
those faults into which he has been led by the 
desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, 
even under physical correction, a share of pride. 
But to be caught lying, if he understands it, in- 
stantly uncurls his fleece. 

Just as among dull observers he preserves a 
name for truth, the dog has been credited with 



i82 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

modesty. It is amazing how the use of language 
blunts the faculties of man — that because vain- 
glory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied 
with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so 
gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were 
suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would 
prate interminably, and still about himself; when 
we had friends, we should be forced to lock him 
in a garret; and what with his whining jealousies 
and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he 
would have gone far to weary out our love. I was 
about to compare him to Sir Willoughby Patterne, 
but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their own 
merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans 
Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his start- 
ling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an ex- 
cruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street 
for shadows of offence — here was the talking dog. 
It is just this rage for consideration that has 
betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the 
friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker ap- 
petites, preserves his independence. But the dog, 
with one eye ever on the audience, has been 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 183 

wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into 
the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased 
hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon 
was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of 
leisure; and except the few whom we keep work- 
ing, the whole race grew more and more self- 
conscious, mannered, and affected. The number of 
things that a small dog does naturally is strangely 
small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed 
under material cares, he is far more theatrical than 
average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any 
pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and 
in the hot pursuit of admiration. Take out your 
puppy for a walk, and you will find the little ball of 
fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let 
but a few months pass, and when you repeat t!ie 
process you will find nature buried in convention. 
He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest pro- 
cesses of our material life will all be bent into the 
forms of an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. 
Instinct, says the fool, has awakened. But it is 
not so. Some dogs — some, at the very least — if 
they be kept separate from others, remain quite 



i84 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

natural ; and these, when at length they meet with 
a companion of experience, and have the game 
explained to them, distinguish themselves by the 
severity of their devotion to its rules. I wish I 
were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly 
illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an 
elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their 
bond of sympathy that both are the children of 
convention. 

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience 
is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug ; 
the sense of the law in their members fatally pre- 
cipitates either towards a frozen and affected bear- 
ing. And the converse is true ; and in the elaborate 
and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions 
and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To fol- 
low for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, 
canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic 
art and the cultured conduct of the body ; in every 
act and gesture you see him true to a refined con- 
ception ; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks 
up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that 
charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 185 

high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, 
is the inborn pretension of the dog. The large 
dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon 
with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in 
effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly 
represent the part. And it is more pathetic and 
perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog 
in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo 
Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is 
feudal and religious ; the ever-present polytheism, 
the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them 
on the one hand ; on the other, their singular dif- 
ference of size and strength among themselves 
effectually prevents the appearance of the demo- 
cratic notion. Or we might more exactly compare 
their society to the curious spectacle presented by 
a school — ushers, monitors, and big and little boys 
— qualified by one circumstance, the introduction 
of the other sex. In each, we should observe a 
somewhat similar tension of manner, and some- 
what similar points of honour. In each the larger 
animal keeps a contemptuous good-humour; in 
each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like im- 



i86 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

pudence, certain of practical immunity ; in each we 
shall find a double life producing double characters, 
and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with 
a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known 
dogs, and I have known school heroes that, set 
aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; 
and if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, 
we must turn to the school playfields or the dung- 
heap where the dogs are trooping. 

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfran- 
chised. Incessant massacre of female innocents 
has changed the proportions of the sexes and per- 
verted their relations. Thus, when we regard the 
manners of the dog, we see a romantic and mo- 
nogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the 
cat, at war with impossible conditions. Man has 
much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet 
more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the 
eyes of Touchstone. But his intervention has at 
least created an imperial situation for the rare 
surviving ladies. In that society they reign with- 
out a rival : conscious queens ; and in the only 
instance of a canine wife-beater that has ever fallen 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 187 

under my notice, the criminal was somewhat ex- 
cused by the circumstances of his story. He is a 
Httle, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as 
black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and 
two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer, 
he is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies o£ 
his race he seems abhorrent. A thorough elaborate 
gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he 
was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. 
He took at their hands the most outrageous treat- 
ment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I 
have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tat- 
tered like a regimental banner; and yet he would 
scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human 
lady upraised the contumelious whip against the 
very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, 
my little great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and 
fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the 
tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years of un- 
availing chivalry, he suddenly, in one hour, threw 
off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shake- 
speare he would then have written Troilus and 
Cressida to brand the offending sex; but being 



i88 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

only a little dog, he began to bite them. The sur- 
prise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the 
monstrosity of his offence ; but he had fairly beaten 
off his better angel, fairly committed moral sui- 
cide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside 
the last rags of decency, he proceeded to attack 
the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing, 
as it does, that ethical laws are common both to 
dogs and men; and that with both a single delib- 
erate violation of the conscience loosens all. " But 
while the lamp holds on to burn," says the para- 
phrase, " the greatest sinner may return." I have 
been cheered to see symptoms of effectual peni- 
tence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling 
that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day 
from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the 
period of Sturm und Drang is closed. 

^11 these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. 
Twe duty to the female dog is plain; but where 
competing duties rise, down they will sit and study 
them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another 
little Skye, somewhat plain in manner and appear- 
ance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 189 

wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, 
he was received for that period by an uncle in the 
same city. The winter over, his own family home 
again, and his own house (of which he was very 
proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma 
between two conflicting duties of loyalty and grati- 
tude. His old friends were not to be neglected, 
but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. 
This was how he solved the problem. Every 
morning, as soon as the door was opened, off 
posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children 
in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was 
back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of 
fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his 
part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the par- 
ticular honour and jewel of his day — his morn- 
ing's walk with my father. And, perhaps from 
this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed 
the practice, and at length returned entirely to his 
ancient habits. But the same decision served him 
in another and more distressing case of divided 
duty, which happened not long after. He was not 
at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him 



I90 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

with unusual kindness during the distemper; and 
though he did not adore her as he adored my father 
— although (born snob) he was critically con- 
scious of her position as '' only a servant " — he 
still cherished for her a special gratitude. Well, 
the cook left, and retired some streets away to 
lodgings of her own ; and there was Coolin in 
precisely the same situation with any young gen- 
tleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a 
faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve 
the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No 
longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the 
whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary 
friend. And so, day by day, he continued to 
comfort her solitude until (for some reason which 
I could never understand and cannot approve) he 
was kept locked up to break him of the graceful 
habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it is the dif- 
ference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly 
marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional 
duration of his visits. Anything further removed 
from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is 
even stirred to a certain impatience with a char- 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 191 

acter so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in 
justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of 
reason. 

There are not many dogs hke this good CooHn, 
and not many people. But the type is one well 
marked, both in the human and the canine family. 
Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and some- 
what oppressive respectability. He was a sworn 
foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser 
of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified 
by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and con- 
scientious in all the steps of his own blameless 
course, he looked for the same precision and an 
even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, 
my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol : 
he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every 
sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he 
announced loudly the death of virtue and the prox- 
imate fall of the pillars of the earth. 

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, 
though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow 
their snobbery among themselves; for though I 
think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we 



192 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edin- 
burg'h, in a good part of the town, there were 
several distinct societies or clubs that met in the 
morning to — the phrase is technical — to " rake 
the backets " in a troop. A friend of mine, the 
master of three dogs, was one day surprised to 
observe that they had left one club and joined 
another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and 
the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was 
more than he could guess. And this illustrates 
pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, 
their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. 
At least, in their dealings with men they are not 
only conscious of sex, but of the difference of sta- 
tion. And that in the most snobbish manner ; for 
the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice 
of the rich, and keeps all his ugly feeling for those 
poorer or more ragged than his master. And 
again, for every station they have an ideal of be- 
haviour, to which the master, under pain of dero- 
gation, will do wisely to conform. How often has 
not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my 
dog was disappointed ; and how much more gladly 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 193 

would he not have taken a beating than to be thus 
wounded in the seat of piety! 

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far Hker 
a cat ; cared httle or nothing for men, with whom 
he merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and was 
entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house 
would not hold him, and to live in a town was 
what he refused. He led, I believe, a life of 
troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond 
all question in a trap. But this was an exception, 
a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the 
hairy human infant. The true dog of the nine- 
teenth century, to judge by the remainder of my 
fairly large acquaintance, is in love with respect- 
ability. A street-dog was once adopted by a lady. 
While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, 
gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' 
stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common 
rogue and vagabond ; but with his rise into society 
he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole 
no more, he hunted no more cats ; and conscious 
of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet 

the canine upper class was never brought to recog- 

13 



194 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

nise the upstart, and from that hour, except for 
human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, 
shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, 
he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with 
his acquired respectability, and with no care but 
to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or 
praise this self-made dog? We praise his human 
brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as 
rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, 
for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, 
the vices that are born with them remain invin- 
cible throughout; and they live all their years, 
glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their 
defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the 
last ; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose 
and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his con- 
science; but Woggs,^ whose soul's shipwreck in 
the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, 
has only twice been known to steal, and has often 
nobly conquered the temptation. , The eighth is 

1 Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogiie-, 
under which last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. 
Glory was his aim and he attained it ; for his icon, by the hand of 
Caldecott, now lies among the treasures of the nation. 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 195 

his favourite commandment. There is something 
painfully human in these unequal virtues and mor- 
tal frailties of the best. Still more painful is the 
bearing of those *' stammering professors " in the 
house of sickness and under the terror of death. 
It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, 
the dog connects together, or confounds, the un- 
easiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. 
To the pains of the body he often adds the tor- 
tures of the conscience; and at these times his 
haggard protestations form, in regard to the human 
deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel. 

I once supposed that I had found an inverse 
relation between the double etiquette which dogs 
obey; and that those who were most addicted to 
the showy street life among other dogs were less 
careful in the practice of home virtues for the 
tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of 
carneying affectations, shines equally in either 
sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains 
with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her 
master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation 
to their crowning point. The attention of man 



196 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus 
appear) the same sensibihty; but perhaps, if we 
could read the canine heart, they would be found 
to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs live 
with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in 
the flattery of his notice and enriched with sine- 
cures. To push their favour in this world of pick- 
ings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their 
lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in 
despair at our persistent ignorance. I read in the 
lives of our companions the same processes of 
reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the 
right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature 
with too rigid custom ; I see them with our weak- 
nesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and 
with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream 
of an ideal ; and yet, as they hurry by me on the 
street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my 
regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives 
is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or 
is he the patron only ? Have they indeed forgotten 
nature's voice? or are those moments snatched 
from courtiership when they touch noses with the 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 197 

tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of 
their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares 
with his dog the toils of a profession and the 
pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the 
poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till 
it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters 
are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested 
cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving 
and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, 
like the majority of men, have but foregone their 
true existence and become the dupes of their 
ambition. 



XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND 
TWOPENCE COLOURED" 

THESE words will be familiar to all stu- 
dents of Skelt's Juvenile Drama. That 
national monument, after having changed 
its name to Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and 
last of all to Pollock's, has now become, for the 
most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like 
Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. 
It may be the Museum numbers a full set; and 
Mr. lonides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, 
may boast their great collections; but to the plain 
private person they are become, like Raphaels, 
unattainable. I have, at different times, possessed 
Aladdin, The Red Rover, The Blind Boy, The Old 
Oak Chest, The Wood Dcemon, Jack Shcppard, 
The Miller and his Men, Der FreischUtc, The 
Smuggler, The Forest of Bondy, Robin Hood, 
The Waterman, Richard I., My Poll and my Part- 
ner Joe, The Inchcape Bell (imperfect), and Three^ 



"A PENNY PLAIN" 199 

Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica; and I have 
assisted others in the illumination of The Maid of 
the Inn and The Battle of Waterloo. In this roll- 
call of stirring names you read the evidences of 
a happy childhood; and though not half of them 
are still to be procured of any living stationer, in 
the mind of their once happy owner all survive, 
kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the 
past. 

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but noAV how 
fallen!) a certain stationer's shop at a corner of 
the wide thoroughfare that joins the city of my 
childhood with the sea. When, upon any Satur- 
day, we made a party to behold the ships, we passed 
that corner ; and since in those days I loved a ship 
as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of it- 
self had been enough to hallow it. But there was 
more than that. In the Leith Walk window, all 
the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in 
working order, with a " forest set," a " combat," 
and a few " robbers carousing " in the slides ; and 
below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays 
themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled 



200 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

one upon another. Long and often have I Hngered 
there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall 
say, was visible in the first plate of characters, 
bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the 
clothyard arrow; I would spell the name: w'as 
it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d 
dress ? O, how I would long to see the rest ! how 
— if the name by chance were hidden — I w^ould 
wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal 
legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! 
And then to go within, to announce yourself 
as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, 
be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly 
devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epi- 
leptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war- 
ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults — it 
was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and 
smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that 
bore the name of boy. They could not pass it 
by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place 
besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding 
Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the 
stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play 



"A PENNY PLAIN'* 201 

out of our hand ere we were trusted with another; 
and, increditable as it may sound, used to demand 
of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came 
with money or with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith 
himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation, once 
swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: 
" I do not believe, child, that you are an intending 
purchaser at all ! " These wxre the dragons of the 
garden; but for such joys of paradise we could 
have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every 
sheet we fingered was another lightning glance 
into obscure, delicious story ; it was like wallowing 
in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to 
compare with it save now and then in dreams, 
when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit 
stories of adventure, from which I awake to find 
the world all vanity. The crux of Buridan's don- 
key was as nothing to the uncertainty of the boy 
as he handled and lingered and doated on these 
bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure 
in the sight and touch of them which he would 
jealously prolong; and when at length the deed 
was done, the play selected, and the impatient 



202 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

shopman had brushed the rest into the grey port- 
foho, and the boy was forth again, a httle late for 
dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue 
winter's even, and The Miller, or The Rover, or 
some kindred drama clutched against his side — 
on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud 
in exultation ! I can hear that laughter still. Out 
of all the years of my life, I can recall but one 
home-coming to compare with these, and that was 
on the night when I brought back with me the 
Arabian Entertainments in the fat, old, double- 
columned volume with the prints. I was just well 
into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when 
my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted 
pretty stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind 
with terror. But instead of ordering the book 
away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might 1 

The purchase and the first half-hour at home, 
that was the summit. Thenceforth the interest 
declined by little and little. The fable, as set forth 
in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the 
scenes and characters : what fable would not ? 
Such passages as : '' Scene 6. The Hermitage. 



"A PENNY PLAIN" 203 

Night set scene. Place back of scene i, No. 2, 
at back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set 
piece, R. H. in a slanting direction " — such pas- 
sages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to 
be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these 
dramas did not much appeal to me. I forget the 
very outline of the plots. Of The Blind Boy, be- 
yond the fact that he was a most injured prince 
and once, I think, abducted, I know nothing. And 
The Old Oak Chest, what was it all about? that 
proscript (ist dress), that prodigious number of 
banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the 
magnificent kitchen in the third act (was it in 
the third?) — they are all fallen in a deliquium, 
swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish. 

I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; 
nor can I quite forgive that child who, wilfully 
foregoing pleasure, stoops to '' twopence coloured." 
With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it — 
crimson lake ! — the horns of elf-land are not 
richer on the ear) — with crimson lake and Prus- 
sian blue a certain purple is to be compounded 
which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. 



204 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS^ 

The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name 
although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of 
such a savoury greenness that to-day my heart re- 
grets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weak- 
ness the very aspect of the water where I dipped 
my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. 
But when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, 
all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a scene 
or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was 
simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court 
the tedium, the worry, and the long-drawn dis- 
enchantment of an actual performance. Two days 
after the purchase the honey had been sucked. 
Parents used to complain ; they thought I wearied 
of my play. It was not so : no more than a person 
can be said to have wearied of his dinner when he 
leaves the bones and dishes ; I had got the marrow 
of it and said grace. 

Then was the time to turn to the back of the 
play-book and to study that enticing double file of 
names, where poetry, for the true child of Skelt, 
reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the 
Queen. Much as I have travelled in these realms 



"A PENNY PLAIN'' 205 

of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or abstract, 
names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of 
memory, and are still but names. The Floating 
Beacon — why was that denied me ? or The Wreck 
Ashore f Sixte en-String Jack, whom I did not 
even guess to be a highwayman, troubled me awake 
and haunted my slumbers; and there is one se- 
quence of three from that enchanted calendar that 
I still at times recall, like a loved verse of poetry: 
Lodoiska, Silver Palace, Echo of Westminster 
Bridge. Names, bare names, are surely more to 
children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools 
remember. 

The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a 
part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It 
may be different with the rose, but the attraction of 
this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had 
crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in 
Skelt's nest. And now w^e have reached Pollock, 
sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt 
appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt 
it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, 
is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, 



2o6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

with reverence be it said, among the works of 
nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is 
an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, 
domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking 
of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melo- 
drama : a peculiar fragrance haunting it ; uttering 
its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has 
the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon 
the art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful 
characters that once so thrilled our soul with their 
bold attitude, array of deadly engines and incom- 
parable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; 
the extreme hard favour of the heroine strikes me, 
I had almost said with pain ; the villain's scowl no 
longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes 
themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, 
seem the efforts of a prentice hand. So much of 
fault we find ; but on the other side the impartial 
critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great 
unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, 
which a man is dead and buriable when he fails 
to answer; of the footlight glamour, the ready- 
made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing 



"A PENNY PLAIN" 207 

not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to 
the mind! 

The scenery of Skeltdom — or, shall we say, the 
kingdom of Transpontus ? — had a prevailing 
character. Whether it set forth Poland as in The 
Blind Boy, or Bohemia with The Miller and his 
Men, or Italy with The Old Oak Chest, still it was 
Transpontus. A botanist could tell it by the plants. 
The hollyhock was all pervasive, running wild in 
deserts; the dock was common, and the bending 
reed; and overshadowing these were poplar, 
palm, potato tree, and Quercus Skeltica — brave 
growths. The caves were all embowelled in the 
Surreyside formation ; the soil was all betrodden 
by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be 
sure, had yet another, an oriental string: he held 
the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter 
of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des 
Isles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions 
realised. But on these I will not dwxll ; they were 
an outwork; it was in the occidental scenery that 
Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour of 
England; it was a sort of indigestion of England 



2o8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charm- 
ing. How the roads wander, how the castle sits 
upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind 
the cloud, and how the congregated clouds them- 
selves uproU, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cot- 
tage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak 
upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and 
powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn 
(this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain 
Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, 
pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock ; and there 
again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, 
which was so dull to colour. England, the hedge- 
row elms, the thin brick . houses, windmills, 
glimpses of the navigable Thames — England, 
when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made 
evident : to cross the border was, for the Scots- 
man, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn- 
sign and there the horse-trough, all foreshadowed 
in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen 
years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to 
load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways 
of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance 



"A PENNY PLAIN" 209 

— still I was but a puppet in the hands of Skelt ; 
the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely 
the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly im- 
proved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of 
Jonathan Wild, pi. i. "This is mastering me," 
as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. 
What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, 
but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped 
himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain 
before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon 
it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the 
theatre to see a good old melodrama, 't is but Skelt 
a little faded. If I visit a bold scene in nature, 
Skelt would have been bolder; there had been 
certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow 
tree — that set piece — I seem to miss it in the 
foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, 
swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem 
to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoy- 
ment; met there the shadows of the characters I 
was to read about and love in a late future; got 
the romance of Dcr Freischutz long ere I was to 

hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a 

14 



2IO MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the 
silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels 
and romances; and took from these rude cuts an 
enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader — 
and yourself? 

A word of moral : it appears that B. Pollock, 
late J. Redington, No. 73 Hoxton Street, not only 
publishes twenty-three of these old stage favour- 
ites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a 
modest readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you 
love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed 
to Pollock's, or to Clarke's of Garrick Street. In 
Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my 
ancient aspirations : Wreck Ashore and Sixteen- 
S trill g Jack; and I cherish the belief that when 
these shall see once more the light of day, B. 
Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, 
I have a dream at times that is not all a dream. I 
seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street — 
E. W., I think, the postal district — close below the 
fool's-cap of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing 
of the echo of the Abbey bridge. There in a dim 
shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue 



"A PENNY PLAIN" 211 

and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with 
great Skelt himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from 
the tomb. I buy, with what a choking heart — I 
buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my 
mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets 
are dust. 



XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL 
OF DUMAS'S 

THE books that we re-read the oftenest are 
not always those that we admire the most ; 
we choose and we revisit them for many 
and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human 
friends. One or two of Scott's novels, Shake- 
speare, Moliere, Montaigne, The Egoist, and the 
Vicomte de Bragelonne, form the inner circle of 
my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of 
dear acquaintances ; The Pilgrim's Progress in the 
front rank. The Bible in Spain not far behind. 
There are besides a certain number that look at me 
with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: 
books that I once thumbed and studied : houses 
which were once like home to me, but where I now 
rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush 
to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns, 
and Hazlitt. Last of all, there is the class of book 
that has its hour of brilliancy — glows, sings, 
charms, and then fades again into insignificance 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 213 

until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile 
and frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and 
Herrick, who, were they but 

" Their sometime selves the same throughout the year," 
must have stood in the first company with the six 
names of my continual literary intimates. To these 
six, incongruous as they seem, I have long been 
faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of 
death. I have never read the whole of Montaigne, 
but I do not like to be long without reading some 
of him, and my delight in what I do read never 
lessens. Of Shakespeare I have read all but 
Richard IIL, Henry VL, Titus AndronicuSj and 
All 's Well that Ends Well; and these, having al- 
ready made' all suitable endeavour, I now know 
that I shall never read — to make up for which 
unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for 
ever. Of Moliere — surely the next greatest name 
of Christendom — I could tell a very similar story ; 
but in a little corner of a little essay these princes 
are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my 
fealty and pass on. How often I have read Giiy 
Mannering, Rob Roy, or Redgauntlet, I have no 



214 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

means of guessing, having begun young. But it is 
either four or five times that I have read The 
Egoist, and either five or six that I have read the 
Vicomte dc Bragclonne. 

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder 
that I should have spent so much of this brief life 
of ours over a work so little famous as the last. 
And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my 
own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My 
acquaintance with the Vicomte began, somewhat 
indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had 
the advantage of studying certain illustrated des- 
sert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d'Ar- 
tagnan in the legends I already saluted like an 
old friend, for I had met it the year before in a 
work of Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in 
one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that 
time out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of 
neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood but 
little of the merits of the book ; my strongest mem- 
ory is of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot 
— a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy, who 
could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 215 

Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two 
financiers. My next reading was in winter-time, 
when I Hved alone upon the Pentlands. I would 
return in the early night from one of my patrols 
with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me 
in the door, a friendly retriever scurry up-stairs to 
fetch my slippers ; and I would sit down with the 
Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light even- 
ing by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it 
silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of 
horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and 
such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings 
solitary in which I gained so many friends. I 
would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, 
and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer 
a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten 
the white hills. Thence I would turn again to that 
crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so 
easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surround- 
ings : a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, 
thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with 
delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic 
into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I re- 



2i6 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

joiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, 
it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn 
to my own labours; for no part of the world has 
ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and 
not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite 
so dear, as d'Artagnan. 

Since then I have been going to and fro at very 
brief intervals in my favourite book; and I have 
now just risen from my last (let me call it my fifth) 
perusal, having liked it better and admired it more 
seriously than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of 
ownership, being so well known in these six vol- 
umes. Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to 
have me read of him, and Louis Ouatorze is grati- 
fied, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Ara- 
mis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays 
to me with his best graces, as to an old patron of 
the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful, something 
may befall me like what befell George IV. about 
the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the 
Vicomte one of the first, and Heaven knows the 
best, of my own works. At least, I avow myself a 
partisan; and Vvhen I compare the popularity of 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 217 

the Viconitc with that of Monte Cristo, or its own 
elder brother, the Trois Moiisquetaires, I confess I 
am both pained and puzzled. 

To those who have already made acquaintance 
with the titular hero in the pages of Vingt Ans 
Apres, perhaps the name may act as a deterrent. A 
man might well stand back if he supposed he were 
to follow, for six volumes, so well-conducted, so 
fme-spoken, and withal so dreary a cavalier as 
Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said 
to have passed the best years of my life in these six 
volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul has 
never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who 
has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered 
to pretend to be dead, I am sometimes reminded 
of a saying in an earlier volume : '' EnUn, dit Miss 
Stewart/' — and it was of Bragelonne she spoke 
— '' enUn il a fait quelquechose: c'est, ma foil bien 
heiireiix." I am reminded of it, as I say; and the 
next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and 
my dear d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sob- 
bing, I can but deplore my flippancy. 

Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of 



2i8 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Vingt Ans Apres is inclined to flee. Well, he is 
right there too, though not so right. Louise is no 
success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is 
well meant, not ill designed, sometimes has a word 
that rings out true; sometimes, if only for a 
breath, she may even engage our sympathies. But 
I have never envied the King his triumph. And so 
far from pitying Bragelonne for his defeat, I could 
wish him no worse (not for Jack of malice, but 
imagination) than to be wedded to that lady. Ma- 
dame enchants me; I can forgive that royal minx 
her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften 
with the King on that memorable occasion when he 
goes to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it 
comes to the '' AUons, ainiez-moi done," it is my 
heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche. Not 
so with Louise. Readers cannot fail to have re- 
marked that what an author tells us of the beauty 
or the charm of his creature goes for naught ; that 
we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot 
open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the 
fine phrases of preparation fall from round her like 
the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 219 

us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or 
perhaps a strapping market-woman. Authors, at 
least, know it well; a heroine will too often start 
the trick of " getting ugly " ; and no disease is 
more difficult to cure. I said authors; but indeed 
I had a side eye to one author in particular, with 
whose works I am very well acquainted, though I 
cannot read them, and who has spent many vigils 
in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and 
(like a magician) wearying his art to restore them 
to youth and beauty. There are others who ride 
too high for these misfortunes. Who doubts the 
loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not more 
lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm 
of Rose Jocelyn, Lucy Desborough, or Clara Mid- 
dleton ? fair women with fair names, the daughters 
of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to 
speak, and I am at her knees. Ah! these are the 
creators of desirable women. They would never 
have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La 
Valliere. It is my only consolation that not one of 
all of them, except the first, could have plucked 
at the moustache of dArtagnan. 



220 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stum- 
ble at the threshold. In so vast a mansion there 
were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices where 
no one would delight to linger; but it was at least 
unhappy that the vestibule should be so badly 
lighted; and until, in the seventeenth chapter, 
d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must con- 
fess, the book goes heavily enough. But, from 
thenceforward, what a feast is spread ! Monk kid- 
napped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; 
the ever delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein 
Aramis outwits dArtagnan, with its epilogue 
(vol. V. chap, xxviii.), where dArtagnan regains 
the moral superiority; the love adventures at 
Fontainebleau, with St. Aignan's story of the dryad 
and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes, and 
Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; 
Aramis at the bastille ; the night talk in the forest 
of Senart; Belle Isle again, with the death of 
Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of 
dArtagnan the untamable, under the lash of the 
young King. What other novel has such epic 
variety and nobility of incident? often, if you will, 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 221 

impossible; often of the order of an Arabian 
story; and yet all based in human nature. For 
if you come to that, what novel has more human 
nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen 
largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye? 
What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and 
wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? 
Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in 
the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there 
is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped 
trifle, strong as silk ; wordy like a village tale ; pat 
like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet 
never tedious ; with no merit, yet inimitably right. 
And, once more, to make an end of commendations, 
what novel is inspired with a more unstrained or a 
more wholesome morality? 

Yes ; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me 
to the name of dArtagnan only to dissuade me 
from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to 
add morality. There is no quite good book without 
a good morality ; but the world is wide, and so are 
morals. Out of two people who have dipped into 
Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and One Nights j 



222 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

one shall have been offended by the animal details ; 
another to whom these were harmless, perhaps 
even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his 
turn by the rascality and cruelty of all the charac- 
ters. Of two readers, again, one shall have been 
pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one 
by that of the Vicomte dc Bragclonne. And the 
point is that neither need be wrong. We shall 
always shock each other both in life and art; we 
cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the ab- 
stract right (if there be such a thing) into our 
books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some 
hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven ; 
enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon 
foul details, a spirit of magnanimity. I would 
scarce send to the Vicomte a reader who was in 
quest of what we may call puritan morality. The 
ventripotent mulatto, the great eater, worker, 
earner and waster, the man of much and witty 
laughter, the man of the great heart and alas! of 
the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set 
before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet 
genial portrait; but with whatever art that may 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 223 

be touched, and whatever indulgence, it will not be 
the portrait of a precisian. Dumas was certainly 
not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he 
put into the mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this 
excellent profession : Monsieur, fetciis unc dc ces 
bonnes pates d'hommes que Dieii a fait pour s'ani- 
mer peiidant un certain temps et pour trouver 
bonnes toutes choscs qui accompmgnent leur scjour 
stir la terre!' He was thinking, as I say, of Plan- 
chet, to whom the words are aptly fitted ; but they 
were fitted also to Planchet's creator ; and perhaps 
this struck him as he wrote, for observe what fol- 
lows : '' D'Artagnan s'assit alors pres de la fenetre, 
ct, cette philosophic de Planchet lui ay ant paru 
solide, il y reva." In a man who finds all things 
good, you will scarce expect much zeal for nega- 
tive virtues : the active alone will have a charm for 
him ; abstinence, however wise, however kind, will 
always seem to such a judge entirely mean and 
partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not 
near his heart ; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that 
virtue of frugality which is the armour of the 
artist. Now, in the Vicornte, he had much to do 



224 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic 
justice should be all upon the side of Colbert, of 
official honesty, and fiscal competence. And Du- 
mas knew it well : three times at least he shows his 
knowledge; once it is but flashed upon us and 
received with the laughter of Fouquet himself, in 
the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint 
Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the 
forest of Senart; in the end, it is set before us 
clearly in one dignified speech of the triumphant 
Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of 
good cheer and wit and art, the swift transactor of 
much business, '' Vhomme de bruit, riiomme de 
plaisir, riiommc qui nest que parccque les aiitres 
sont/' Dumas saw something of himself and drew 
the figure the more tenderly. It is to me even 
touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's honour ; 
not seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour 
is impossible to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, 
in the light of his own life, seeing it too well, and 
clinging the more to what was left. Honour can 
survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a 
member. The man rebounds from his disgrace ; he 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 225 

begins fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; 
and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly 
with his dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book ; 
so it was with Dumas on the battlefield of life. 

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality 
is virtue in the man ; but perhaps to sing its praises 
is scarcely to be called morality in the writer. And 
it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, 
that we must look for that spirit of morality, 
which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes 
one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it 
high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the 
coming of years, has declined too much into the 
preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but 
dArtagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, 
rough, kind, and upright, that he takes the heart by 
storm. There is nothing of the copy-book about 
his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his 
fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; 
he is no district visitor — no Wesley or Robe- 
spierre; his conscience is void of all refinement 
whether for good or evil ; but the whole man rings 
true like a good sovereign. Readers who have ap- 



226 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

proached the Vicomtc, not across country, but by 
the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the Moiis- 
qiictaircs and Vingt Ans Aprcs, will not have for- 
gotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly 
improbable trick upon Milady. What a pleasure it 
is, then, what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson, 
to see the old captain humble himself to the son of 
the man whom he had personated! Here, and 
throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself 
or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d'Ar- 
tagnan. I do not say there is no character as well 
drawn in Shakespeare ; I do say there is none that 
I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes 
that seem to spy upon our actions — eyes of the 
dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold 
us in our most private hours, and wdiom we fear 
and scruple to offend : our w^itnesses and judges. 
And among these, even if you should think me 
childish, I must count my d'Artagnan — not d'Ar- 
tagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended 
to prefer — a preference, I take the freedom of say- 
ing, in which he stands alone ; not the d'Artagnan 
of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; 



A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 227 

not Nature's, but Dumas's. And this is the par- 
ticular crown and triumph of the artist — not to 
be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to 
convince, but to enchant. 

There is yet another point in the Vicomte which 
I find incomparable. I can recall no other work of 
the imagination in which the end of life is repre- 
sented with so nice a tact. I w^as asked the other 
day if Dumas made me laugh or cry. Well, in this 
my late fifth reading of the Vicomte, I did laugh 
once at the small Coquelin de Voliere business, 
and was perhaps a thought surprised at having 
done so : to make up for it, I smiled continually. 
But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol 
to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a 
very airy foot — within a measurable distance of 
unreality; and for those who like the big guns to 
be discharged and the great passions to appear 
authentically, it may even seem inadequate from 
first to last. Not so to me; I cannot count that a 
poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet \\\t\\ 
those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, I 
find a singular charm of spirit. It breathes a 



228 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

pleasant and a tonic sadness, always brave, never 
hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this 
long tale, evening gradually falls ; and the lights are 
extinguished, and the heroes pass away one by one. 
One by one they go, and not a regret embitters 
their departure; the young succeed them in their 
places, Louis Ouatorze is swelling larger and 
shining broader, another generation and another 
France dawn on the horizon ; but for us and these 
old men whom we have loved so long the inevitable 
end draws near and is welcome. To read this 
well is to anticipate experience. Ah, if only when 
these hours of the long shadows fall for us in 
reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them 
with a mind as quiet! 

But my paper is running out ; the siege guns are 
firing on the Dutch frontier ; and I must say adieu 
for the fifth time to my old comrade fallen on the 
field of glory. Adieu — rather au revolr! Yet 
a sixth time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap 
Monk and take horse together for Belle Isle. 



) 



XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

IN anything fit to be called by the name of 
reading, the process itself should be absorb- 
ing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a 
book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from 
the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kalei- 
doscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of 
continuous thought. The words, if the book be 
eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like 
the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, 
repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the 
eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so 
closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the 
bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence 
and thought, character and conversation, were but 
obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a 
certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. For 
my part, I liked a story to begin with an old way- 
side inn where, " towards the close of the year 
T*" — ," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were 



230 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the 
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to 
windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean 
proportions striding along the beach ; he, to be 
sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my 
home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed 
altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I 
affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full 
to the brim ; a Jacobite would do, but the highway- 
man was my favourite dish. I can still hear that 
merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; 
night and the coming of the day are still related in 
my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry 
Abershaw ; and the words " postchaise," the 
*' great North road," " ostler," and ^' nag " still 
sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, 
and each with his particular fancy, we read story- 
books in childhood, not for eloquence or character 
or thought, but for some quality of the brute in- 
cident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or 
wonder. Although each of these was welcome in 
its place, the charm for the sake of which we read 
depended on something different from either. My 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 231 

elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still 
remember four different passages which I heard, 
before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting 
pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be 
the admirable opening of What will he Do zvith It: 
it was no wonder I was pleased with that. The 
other three still remain unidentified. One is a little 
vague ; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and 
people groping on the stairs by the light that es- 
caped from the open door of a sick-room. In an- 
other, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a 
cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted 
windows and the figures of the dancers as they 
moved. This was the most sentimental impression 
I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat 
deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who 
had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked 
forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and 
witnessed the horrors of a wreck. ^ Different as 
they are, all these early favourites have a common 
note — they have all a touch of the romantic. 

1 Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery o£ 
Charles Kingsley. 



232 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the 
poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take 
in hfe is of two sorts — the active and the passive. 
Now we are conscious of a great command over 
our destiny ; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, 
as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not 
how into the future. Now we are pleased by our 
conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. 
It would be hard to say which of these modes of 
satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is 
surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts 
of life, they say; but I think they put it high. 
There is a vast deal in life and letters both which 
is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either 
does not regard the human will at all, or deals with 
it in obvious and healthy relations; where the in- 
terest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to 
do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the 
passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, 
but on the problems of the body and of the practical 
intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock 
of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such mate- 
rial as this it is impossible to build a play, for the 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 233 

serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and 
is a standing proof of the dissemination of the 
human conscience. But it is possible to build, upon 
this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the 
most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales. 

One thing in life calls for another; there is a 
fitness in events and places. The sight of a 
pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there. 
One place suggests work, another idleness, a third 
early rising and long rambles in the dew. The 
effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted 
cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open 
ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous 
desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should 
happen ; we know not what, yet we proceed in 
quest of it. x\nd many of the happiest hours of 
life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius 
of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of 
young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep sound- 
ings, particularly torture and delight me. Some- 
thing must have happened in such places, and per- 
haps ages back, to members of my race ; and when 
I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate 



234 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit 
them with the proper story. Some places speak 
distinctly. .Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a 
murder ; certain old houses demand to be haunted ; 
certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other 
spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive 
and impenetrable, '' miching mallecho." The inn 
at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green 
garden and silent, eddying river — though it is 
known already as the place where Keats wrote 
some of his Ejidymion and Nelson parted from his 
Emma — still seems to wait the coming of the ap- 
propriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind 
these old green shutters, some further business 
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes 
Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon 
my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, 
beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, 
half marine — in front, the ferry bubbling with the 
tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; 
behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans 
seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, 
who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 2ss 

But you need not tell me — that is not all ; there is 
some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which 
must express the meaning of that inn more fully. 
So it is with names and faces; so it is with inci- 
dents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, 
and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint 
romance, w^iich the all-careless author leaves un- 
told. How many of these romances have we not 
seen determine at their birth; how many people 
have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, 
and sunk at once into trival acquaintances ; to how 
many places have we not drawn near, with express 
intimations — '' here my destiny awaits me " — 
and we have but dined there and passed on ! I have 
lived both at the Hawes and Bur ford in a perpetual 
flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adven- 
ture that should justify the place; but though the 
feeling had me to bed at night and called me again 
at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and 
suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. 
The man or the hour had not yet come; but some 
day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's 
Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty 



236 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with 
his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at 
Burford.i 

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with 
which any lively literature has to count. The 
desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire 
for meat, is not more deeply seated than this de- 
mand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of 
clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the 
feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and 
even as the imaginative grown person, joining in 
the game, at once enriches it with many delightful 
circumstances, the great creative writer shows us 
the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams 
of common men. His stories may be nourished 
with the realities of life, but their true mark is to 
satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to 
obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right 
kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of 
place; the right kind of thing should follow; and 
not only the characters talk aptly and think natur- 

1 Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat 
with my own hands in Kid)iapped. Some day, perhaps, I may try 
a rattle at the shutters. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 237 

ally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one 
to another like notes in music. The threads of a 
story come from time to time together and make a 
picture in the web ; the characters fall from time to 
time into some attitude to each other or to nature, 
which stamps the story home like an illustration. 
Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shout- 
ing over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the 
great bow, Christian running with his fingers in 
his ears, these are each culminating moments in the 
legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye 
for ever. Other things we may forget; we may 
forget the words, although they are beautiful ; we 
may forget the author's comment, although perhaps 
it was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making 
scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a 
story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for 
sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very 
bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can 
efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is 
the plastic part of literature : to embody character, 
thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that 
shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. 



238 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

This is the highest and hardest thing to do in 
words; the thing which, once accompHshed, 
equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and 
makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Com- 
pared with this, all other purposes in literature, 
except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, 
are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and 
feeble in result. It is one thing to write about 
the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the 
word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the 
heart of the suggestion and make a country famous 
with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to 
dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complica- 
tions of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite 
another to give them body and blood in the story 
of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but 
the second is something besides, for it is likewise 
art. 

English people of the present day ^ are apt, I 
know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, 
and reserve their admiration for the clink of tea- 
spoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought 
1 1SS2. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 239 

clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at 
least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the 
low^est terms, a certain interest can be communi- 
cated by the art of narrative; a sense of human 
kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, 
comparable to the words and air of Sandy's Midi, 
preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences re- 
corded. Some people work, in this manner, with 
even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable 
clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this con- 
nection. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine 
himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's 
collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnette 
dallying in the deserted banquet-room, are typical 
incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying a 
crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon 
Crawley's blow were not delivered. Vanity Fair 
would cease to be a work of art. That scene is the 
chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of 
energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and con- 
solation of the reader. The end of Esmond is a 
yet wider excursion from the author's customary 
fields ; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas ; the 



240 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

great and wily English borrower has here borrowed 
from the great, unblushing French thief ; as usual, 
he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking 
of the sword rounds off the best of all his books 
with a manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing 
can more strongly illustrate the necessity for mark- 
ing incident than to compare the living fame of 
Robinson Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa 
Harlozve. Clarissa is a book of a far more start- 
ling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with 
inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains 
wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of 
spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained 
humanity ; and if the death of the heroine be some- 
what frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero 
strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, 
between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And 
yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a 
tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the 
wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity 
and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes 
on from edition to edition, ever young, while 
Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 241 

mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years 
old and could neither read nor write, when he 
heard a chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm 
kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, 
huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm an- 
other man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, 
divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, 
and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleas- 
ure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to 
read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book. It 
had been lost, nor could he find another copy but 
one that was in English. Down he sat once more, 
learned English, and at length, and with entire de- 
light, read Robinson. It is like the story of a love- 
chase. If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, 
would he have been fired with the same chivalrous 
ardour ? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every quality 
that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted 
— pictorial or picture-making romance. While 
Robinson depends, for the most part and with the 
overwhelming majority of its readers, on the 
charm of circumstance. 

In the highest achievements of the art of words, 



242 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and ro- 
mantic interest, rise and fall together by a com- 
mon and organic law. Situation is animated with 
passion, passion clothed upon with situation. 
Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolu- 
bly with the other. This is high art ; and not only 
the highest art possible in words, but the highest 
art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and 
diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. 
Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have 
the epic weight. But as from a school of works, 
aping the creative, incident and romance are ruth- 
lessly discarded, so may character and drama be 
omitted or subordinated to romance. There is one 
book, for example, more generally loved than 
Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still 
delights in age — I mean the Arabian Nights — 
where you shall look in vain for moral or for intel- 
lectual interest. No human face or voice greets us 
among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sor- 
cerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most 
naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and 
is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 243 

nearest of any modern to these Arabian authors in 
the purely material charm of some of his romances. 
The early part of Monte Cristo, down to the find- 
ing of the treasure, is a piece of perfect story- 
telling; the man never breathed who shared these 
moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria 
is a thing of packthread and Dantes little more than 
a name. The sequel is one long-drawn error, 
gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull; but as for 
these early chapters, I do not believe there is 
another volume extant where you can breathe the 
same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is 
very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high moun- 
tain ; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in propor- 
tion. I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a 
very clever lady setting forth on a second or third 
voyage into Monte Cristo. Here are stories which 
powerfully affect the reader, which can be re- 
perused at any age, and where the characters are no 
more than puppets. The bony fist of the showman 
visibly propels them; their springs are an open 
secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled 
with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their 



244 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

adventures. And the point may be illustrated still 
further. The last interview between Lucy and 
Richard Feverel is pure drama ; more than that, it 
is the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the 
English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, 
on the other hand, is pure romance ; it has nothing 
to do with character ; it might happen to any other 
boy and maiden, and be none the less delightful 
for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold 
man who should choose between these passages. 
Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, 
each capital in its order : in the one, human pas- 
sion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine 
voice ; in the second, according circumstances, like 
instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but 
desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for 
ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, 
we may hesitate to give the preference to either. 
The one may ask more genius — I do not say it 
does ; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the 
memory. 

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of 
all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 245 

of the ideal ; it does not refuse the most pedestrian 
reaHsm. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is ro- 
mantic: both qualities are pushed to an extreme, 
and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend 
upon the material importance of the incidents. To 
deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, 
pirates, war and murder, is to conjure with great 
names, and, in the event of failure, to double the 
disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at 
the Canon's villa is a very trifling incident; yet we 
may read a dozen boisterous stories from begin- 
ning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring 
an impression of adventure. It was the scene of 
Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so 
bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surpris- 
ing. Every single article the cast-away recovers 
from the hulk is " a joy for ever " to the man who 
reads of them. They are the things that should be 
found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I 
found a glimmer of the same interest the other day 
in a new book. The Sailor's Sweetheart, by Mr. 
Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig 
Morning Star is very rightly felt and spiritedly 



246 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

written; but the clothes, the books and the money 
satisfy the reader's mind hke things to eat. We are 
deahng here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate 
interest of treasure trove. But even treasure 
trove can be made dull. There are few people 
who have not groaned under the plethora of goods 
that fell to the lot of the Swiss Family Robinson, 
that dreary family. They found article after 
article, creature after creature, from milk kine to 
pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no 
informing taste had presided over the selection, 
there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and 
these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods 
in Verne's Mysterious Island is another case in 
point; there was no gusto and no glamour about 
that; it might have come from a shop. Biit the 
two hundred and seventy-eight Australian sover- 
eigns on board the Morning Star fell upon me like 
a surprise that I had expected ; whole vistas of sec- 
ondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated 
forth from that discovery, as they radiate from a 
striking particular in life ; and I was made for the 
moment as happy as a reader has the right to be. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 247 

To come at all at the nature of this quality of 
romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of 
our attitude to any art. No art produces illusion ; 
in the theatre we never forget that we are in the 
theatre; and while we read a story, we sit wavei*- 
ing between two minds, now merely clapping our 
hands at the merit of the performance, now conde- 
scending to take an active part in fancy with the 
characters. This last is the triumph of romantic 
story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at 
being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now, 
in character-studies the pleasure that we take is 
critical ; we watch, we approve, we smile at incon- 
gruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sym- 
pathy with courage, suffering, or virtue. But the 
characters are still themselves, they are not us ; the 
more clearly they are depicted, the more widely 
do they stand away from us, the more imperiously 
do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. 
I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or 
wdth Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope 
or fear in common with them. It is not character 
but incident that woos us out of our reserve. 



248 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Something happens as we desire to have it happen 
to ourselves; some situation, that we have long 
dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with 
enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget 
the characters ; then we push the hero aside ; then 
we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe 
in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do 
we say we have been reading a romance. It is not 
only pleasurable things that we imagine in our 
day-dreams ; there are lights in which we are will- 
ing to contemplate even the idea of our own death ; 
ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to 
be cheated, wounded, or calumniated. It is thus 
possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, 
in which every incident, detail, and trick of circum- 
stance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. 
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the 
child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere 
and tenor of his life ; and when the game so chimes 
with his fancy that he can join in it with all his 
heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when 
he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection 
with entire delight, fiction is called romance. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 249 

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the 
romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisput- 
able claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness 
and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story 
as a man would make up for himself, walking, in 
the best health and temper, through just such 
scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm 
dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as 
the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note ; 
hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the 
scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, 
a new and green possession, not unworthy of that 
beautiful name. The Lady of the Lake, or that di- 
rect, romantic opening, — one of the most spirited 
and poetical in literature, — " The stag at eve had 
drunk his fill." The same strength and the same 
weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In 
that ill-written, ragged book. The Pirate, the figure 
of Cleveland — ; cast up by the sea on the resound- 
ing foreland of Dunrossness — moving, with the 
blood on his hands and the Spanish words on 
his tongue, among the simple islanders — singing 
a serenade under the window of his Shetland 



250 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

mistress — is conceived in the very highest manner 
of romantic invention. The words of his songr, 
" Through groves of pahn/' sung in such a scene 
and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the 
emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In 
Guy Mannering, again, every incident is delight- 
ful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry 
Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance 
of romantic method. 

*' ' I remember the tune well,' he says, * though I 
cannot guess what should at present so strongly re- 
call it to my memory.' He took his flageolet from 
his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently 
the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a 
damsel. . . . She immediately took up the song — 

" ' Are these the links of Forth, she said ; 
Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head 
That I so fain would see ? ' 

" ' By heaven ! ' said Bertram, ' it is the very 
ballad.' " 

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. 
First, as an instance of modern feeling for ro- 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 251 

mance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the 
old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. 
Miss Braddon's idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's 
idea of a wooden leg, were something strange 
to have expounded. As a matter of personal ex- 
perience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram on 
the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene of 
the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of 
Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to 
ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The 
second point is still more curious. The reader will 
observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted 
by me. Well, here is how it runs in the original: 
" a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about 
half-way down the descent, and which had once 
supplied the castle with water, was engaged in 
bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy 
would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. 
Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the 
presence of the " damsel " ; he has forgotten to 
mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; 
and now, face to face with his omission, instead of 
trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter. 



252 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It 
is not merely bad English, or bad style ; it is abomi- 
nably bad narrative besides. 

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is 
one that throws a strong light upon the subject of 
this paper. For here we have a man of the finest 
creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and 
charm the romantic junctures of his story ; and we 
find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, 
incapable, in the technical matter of style, and not 
only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in 
points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and 
particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong, 
and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of 
too many of his heroes have already wearied two 
generations of readers. At times his characters will 
speak with something far beyond propriety with a 
true heroic note ; but on the next page they will be 
wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical 
and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man 
who could conceive and write the character of 
Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has con- 
ceived and written it, had not only splendid roman- 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 2S3 

tic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, 
that he could so often fob us off with languid, inar- 
ticulate twaddle ? 

It seems to me that the explanation is to be 
found in the very quality of his surprising merits. 
As his books are play to the reader, so were they 
play to him. He conjured up the romantic with 
delight, but he had hardly patience to describe it. 
He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beau- 
tiful and humourous visions, but hardly a great 
artist ; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. 
He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of the 
pleasures of his art he tasted fully ; but of its toils 
and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A 
great romantic — an idle child. 



XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE^ 

I 

WE have recently^ enjoyed a quite peculiar 
pleasure: hearing, in some detail, the 
opinions, about the art they practise, of 
Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; two 
men certainly of very different calibre : Mr. James 
so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupu- 
lous of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, 
with so persuasive and humourous a vein of whim : 
Mr. James the very" type of the deliberate artist, Mr. 
Besant the impersonation of good-nature. That 
such doctors should differ will excite no great sur- 
prise; but one point in which they seem to agree 
fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both 
content to talk about the " art of fiction " ; and 
Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly bold, goes on to 

1 This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is 
reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last. 
^ 1SS4. 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 255 

oppose this so-called " art of fiction " to the " art of 
poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing 
but the art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only 
comparable with the art of prose. For that heat 
and height of sane emotion which we agree to 
call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and 
vagrant quality ; present, at times, in any art, more 
often absent from them all; too seldom present in 
the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode 
and epic. Fiction is in the same case; it is no 
substantive art, but an element which enters largely 
into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Words- 
worth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in 
fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either 
Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, 
entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Be- 
sant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming 
essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded as a defi- 
nition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me 
suggest another; let me suggest that what both 
Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither 
more nor less than the art of narrative. 

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of 



Q.SG MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

" the modern English novel," the stay and bread- 
winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the 
most pleasing novel on that roll, All Sorts and 
Conditions of Men, the desire is natural enough. 
I can conceive, then, that he would hasten to pro- 
pose two additions, and read thus: the art of 
fictitious narrative in prose. 

Now the fact of the existence of the modern 
English novel is not to be denied ; materially, with 
its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, 
it is easily distinguishable from other forms of liter- 
ature ; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of 
art, it is needful to build our definitions on some 
more fundamental ground than binding. Why, 
then, are we to add " in prose " ? The Odyssey 
appears to me the best of romances ; The Lady of 
the Lake to stand high in the second order; and 
Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of 
the matter and art of the modern English novel 
than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether 
a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spen- 
serian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the 
chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 257 

the art of narrative must be equally observed. The 
choice of a noble and swelling style in prose affects 
the problem of narration in the same way, if not 
to the same degree, as the choice of measured 
verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, 
a higher key of dialogue, and a more picked arid 
stately strain of words. If you are to refuse Don 
Juan, it is hard to see why you should include 
Zanoni or (to bracket works of very different 
value) The Scarlet Letter; and by what discrim- 
ination are you to open your doors to The Pil- 
grim's Progress and close them on The Faery 
Queen? To bring things closer home, I will here 
propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A nar- 
rative called Paradise Lost was written in English 
verse by one John Milton; what was it then? It 
was next translated by Chateaubriand into French 
prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the French 
translation was, by some inspired compatriot of 
George Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into 
an English novel; and, in the name of clearness, 
what was it then? 

But, once more, why should we add " fictitious " ? 



258 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, 
if something more recondite, does not want for 
weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, 
whether it is apphed to the selection and iUustra- 
tion of a real series of events or of an imaginary 
series. Boswell's Life of Johnson (a work of cun- 
ning and inimitable art) owes its success to the 
same technical manoeuvres as (let us say) Tom 
Jones: the clear conception of certain characters 
of man, the choice and presentation of certain 
incidents out of a great number that offered, and 
the invention (yes, invention) and preservation of 
a certain key in dialogue. In which these things 
are done with the more art — in which with the 
greater air of nature — readers will differently 
judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, 
and almost a generic ; but it is not only in Boswell, 
it is in every biography with any salt of life, it 
is in every history where events and men, rather 
than ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Carlyle, 
in Michelet, in Macaulay — that the novelist will 
find many of his own methods most conspicuously 
and adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE asg 

who is free — who has the right to invent or steal 
a missing incident, who has the right, more precious 
still, of wholesale omission — is frequently de- 
feated, and, with all his advantages, leaves a less 
strong impression of reality and passion. Mr. 
James utters his mind with a becoming fervour 
on the sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more 
careful examination truth will seem a word of 
very debatable propriety, not only for the labours 
of the novelist, but for those of the historian. 
No art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. James 

— can successfully " compete with life " ; and the 
art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish 
montibus aviis. Life goes before us, infinite in 
complication; attended by the most various and 
surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, 
to the ear, to the mind — the seat of wonder, to 
the touch — so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly 

— so imperious when starved. It combines and 
employs in its manifestation the method and ma- 
i-erial, not of one art only, but of all the arts. 
Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of 
life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of 



26o MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

its pageantry of light and colour; literature does 
but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral 
obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and 
agony, with which it teems. To " compete with 
life," whose sun we cannot look upon, whose pas- 
sions and diseases waste and slay us — to compete 
with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, 
the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and 
separation — here is, indeed, a projected escalade 
of heaven ; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules 
in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary 
to depict the passions, armed with a tube of supe- 
rior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insuf- 
ferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none 
can " compete with life": not even history, built 
indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed 
of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we 
read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, 
we are surprised, and justly commend the author's 
talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for 
a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse 
is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that 
these phantom reproductions of experience, even 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 261 

at their most acute, convey decided pleasure ; while 
experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture 
and slay. 

What, then, is the object, what the method, of 
an art, and what the source of its power? The 
whole secret is that no art does " compete with 
life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or 
creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle 
and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic 
and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, 
coloured, and mobile nature at our feet, and regard 
instead a certain figmentary abstraction. Geome- 
try will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in 
nature ; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, 
it lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. 
Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake- 
white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already 
given up relief and movement; and instead of 
vying with nature, arranges a scheme of har- 
monious tints. Literature, above all in its most 
typical mood, the mood of narrative, similarly flees 
the direct challenge and pursues instead an inde- 
pendent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at 



262 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

all, it imitates not life but speech : not the facts of 
human destiny, but the emphasis and* the suppres- 
sions with which the human actor tells of them. 
The real art that dealt with life directly was 
that of the first men who told their stories 
round the savage camp-fire. Our art is oc- 
cupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much 
in making stories true as in making them typi- 
cal; not so much in capturing the lineaments 
of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards 
a common end. For the welter of impressions, all 
forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it sub- 
stitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all 
indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at 
the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all 
chiming together like consonant notes in music or 
like the graduated tints in a good picture. From 
all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sen- 
tences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes 
its one creative and controlling thought; to this 
must every incident and character contribute; the 
style must have been pitched in unison with this; 
and if there is anywhere a word that looks another 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 263 

way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I; 
had almost said) fuller without it. Life is mon-'| 
strous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a' 
work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self- 
contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate. Life 
imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; 
art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of 
experience, like an air artificially made by a dis- 
creet musician. A proposition of geometry does 
not compete with life ; and a proposition of geome- 
try is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. 
Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact ; 
both inhere in nature, neither represents it. The 
novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its re- 
semblances to life, which are forced and material, as 
a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its im- 
measurable difference from life, which is designed 
and significant, and is both the method and the 
meaning of the work. 

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but 
the inexhaustible magazine from which subjects 
are to be selected ; the name of these is legion ; 
and with each new subject — for here again I must 



264 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

differ by the whole width of heaven from Mr. 
James — the true artist will vary his method and 
change the point of attack. That which was in one 
case an excellence, will become a defect in another ; 
what was the making of one book, will in the next 
be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and then 
each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will 
take, for instance, three main classes, which are 
fairly distinct : first, the novel of adventure, which 
appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogi- 
cal tendencies in man; second, the novel of char- 
acter, which appeals to our intellectual appreciation 
of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant mo- 
tives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals 
with the same stuff as the serious theatre, and ap- 
peals to our emotional nature and moral judgment. 
And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James 
refers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little 
book about a quest for hidden treasure ; but he lets 
fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In 
this book he misses what he calls the " immense 
luxury " of being able to quarrel with his author. 
The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judg- 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 265 

ment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow., 
and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find 
fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid; 
aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's 
reason. He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, 
"because," says he, comparing it with another 
work, '" / hGve been a child, hut I have never been 
on a quest for buried treasure/' Here is, indeed, ai 
wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest 
for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he 
has never been a child. There never was a child 
(unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and 
been a pirate, and a military commander, and a 
bandit of the mountains ; but has fought, and suf-: 
fered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little 
hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost 
battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and 
beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has pro- 
tested with excellent reason against too narrow a 
conception of experience; for the born artist, he 
contends, the "faintest hints of life" are con- 
verted into revelations ; and it will be found true, I 
believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes 



,266 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

.with more gusto and effect of those things which 
he has only wished to do, than of those which 
he has done. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and 
Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is true 
that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work 
in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone 
questing after gold, it is probable that both have 
ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of 
such a life in youthful day-dreams ; and the author, 
counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and 
low-minded man!) that this class of interest, hav- 
ing been frequently treated, finds a readily accessi- 
ble and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, 
addressed himself throughout to the building up 
and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Char- 
acter to the boy is a sealed book ; for him, a pirate 
is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, and a liberal 
complement of pistols. The author, for the sake of 
circumstantiation and because he was himself more 
or less grown up, admitted character, within cer- 
tain limits, into his design ; but only within certain 
limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme 
of another sort, they had been drawn to very 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 267 

different purpose; for in this elementary novel of 
adventure, the characters need to be presented with 
but one class of qualities — the warlike and for- 
midable. So as they appear insidious in deceit and 
fatal in the combat, they have served their end. 
Danger is the matter with which this class of novel 
deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; 
and the characters are portrayed only so far as they 
realise the sense of danger and provoke the sym- 
pathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, 
to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest 
while we are running the fox of material interest, 
is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The 
stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever 
reader lose the scent. 

The novel of character has this difference from 
all others : that it requires no coherency of plot, 
and for this reason, as in the case of Gil Bias, it 
is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It 
turns on the humours of the persons represented; 
these are, to be sure, embodied in incidents, but the 
incidents themselves, being tributary, need not 
march in a progression; and the characters may 



268 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

be statically shown. As they enter, so they may 
go out ; they must be consistent, but they need not 
grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of 
much of his own work : he treats, for the most part, 
the statics of character, studying it at rest or only 
gently moved ; and, with his usual delicate and just 
artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions 
which would deform the attitudes he loves to study, 
and change his sitters from the humourists of ordi- 
nary life to the brute forces and bare types of more 
emotional moments. In his recent Author of Bel- 
trafRo, so just in conception, so nimble and neat in 
w^orkmanship, strong passion is indeed employed; 
but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the 
heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; 
and the great struggle, the true tragedy, the scene- 
d-faire, passes unseen behind the panels of a locked 
door. The delectable invention of the young vis- 
itor is introduced, consciously or not, to this end: 
that Mr. James, true to his method, might avoid 
the scene of passion. I trust no reader will sup- 
pose me guilty of undervaluing this little master- 
piece. I mean merely that it belongs to one marked 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 26. 

class of novel, and that it would have been ver^ 
differently conceived and treated had it belongec 
to that other marked class, of which I now proceec 
to speak. 

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel b} 
that name, because it enables me to point out b} 
the way a strange and peculiarly English miscon- 
ception. It is sometimes supposed that the drams 
consists of incident. It consists of passion, whicli 
gives the actor his opportunity; and that passion 
must progressively increase, or the actor, as the 
piece proceeded, would be unable to carry the au- 
dience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest 
and emotion. A good serious play must therefore 
be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, 
where duty and inclination come nobly to the 
grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for 
that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a 
few worthy specimens, all of our own day and lan- 
guage; Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, that wonder- 
ful and painful book, long out of print,^ and hunted 
for at book-stalls like an Aldine ; Hardy's Pair of 

^ Now no longer so, thank Heaven ! 



lyo MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

Blue Eyes; and two of Charles Reade's, Griffith 
^aunt and The Double Marriage, originally called 
White Lies, and founded (by an accident quaintly 
favourable to my nomenclature) on a play by Ma- 
luet, the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind 
3f novel the closed door of The Author of Beltraf- 
lo must be broken open; passion must appear 
ipon the scene and utter its last word; passion is 
;he be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, 
:he protagonist and the deus ex machina in one. 
The characters may come anyhow upon the stage : 
we do not care ; the point is, that, before they leave 
it, they shall become transfigured and raised out 
3f themselves by passion. It may be part of the 
design to draw them with detail; to depict a full- 
length character, and then behold it melt and 
change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no 
obligation of the sort; nice portraiture is not re- 
quired ; and we are content to accept mere abstract 
types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A 
novel of this class may be even great, and yet con- 
tain no individual figure ; it may be great, because 
it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 271 

the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an 
artist of the second class it is, indeed, even more 
likely to be great, when the issue has thus been 
narrowed and the whole force of the writer's 
mind directed to passion alone. Cleverness again, 
which has its fair field in the novel of character, 
is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre. 
A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the 
issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us 
like an insincerity. All should be plain, all straight- 
forward to the end. Hence it is that, in Rhoda 
Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the 
reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are 
too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her 
surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the 
reader when Balzac, after having begun the 
Dnchesse de Langeais in terms of strong if some- 
what swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derange- 
ment of the hero's clock. Such personages and 
incidents belong to the novel of character; they 
are out of place in the high society of the passions ; 
wdien the passions are introduced in art at their 
full height, we look to see them, not baffled and 



272 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

impotently striving, as in life, but towering above 
circumstance and acting substitutes for fate. 

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his 
lucid sense, to intervene. To much of what I have 
said he would apparently demur; in much he 
would, somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may 
be true; but it is not what he desired to say or to 
hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its 
worth when done ; I, of the brushes, the palette, and 
the north light. He uttered his views in the tone 
and for the ear of good society; I, with the em- 
phasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. 
But the point, I may reply, is not merely to amuse 
the public, but to offer helpful advice to the young 
writer. And the young writer will not so much be 
helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire 
to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must 
be on the lowest terms. The best that we can say 
to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether 
of character or passion; carefully construct his 
plot so that every incident is an illustration of the 
motive, and every property employed shall bear to 
it a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 273 

a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, the 
sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main 
intrigue ; suffer not his style to flag below the level 
of the argument; pitch the key of conversation, 
not with any thought of how men talk in par- 
lours but with a single eye to the degree of pas- 
sion he may be called on to express; and allow 
neither himself in the narrative nor any character 
in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence 
that is not part and parcel of the business of the 
story or the discussion of the problem involved. 
Let him not regret if this shortens his book ; it will 
be better so ; for to add irrelevant matter is not to 
lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss 
a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly 
in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not 
care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, 
the pungent material detail of the day's manners, 
the reproduction of the atmosphere and the envi- 
ronment. These elements are not essential : a 
novel may be excellent, and yet have none of them ; 
a passion or a character is so much the better de- 
picted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. 

18 



274 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

In this age of the particular, let him remember the 
ages of. the abstract, the great books of the past, 
the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and 
before Balzac. And as the root of the whole mat- 
ter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a 
transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; 
but a simplification of some side or point of life, to 
stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For al- 
though, in great men, working upon great motives, 
what we observe and admire is often their com- 
plexity, yet underneath appearances the truth re- 
mains unchanged : that simplification was their 
method, and that simplicity is their excellence. 

II 

Since the above was written another novelist has 
entered repeatedly the lists of theory: one well 
worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells ; and none 
ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. 
His own work and those of his pupils and masters 
singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave, the 
zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in 
art like what there is in science ; he thinks of past 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 275 

things as radically dead; he thinks a form can be 
outlived: a strange immersion in his. own history; 
a strange forgetfulness of the history of the race ! 
Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works (could he 
see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much 
of this illusion would be dispelled. For while he 
holds all the poor little orthodoxies of the day — 
no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday 
or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far 
as they are exclusive — the living quality of much 
that he has done is of a contrary, I had almost said 
of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, 
of an originally strong romantic bent — a certain 
glow of romance still resides in many of his books, 
and lends them their distinction. As by accident he 
runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is 
then, as often as not, that his reader rejoices - 
justly, as I contend. For in all this excessive 
eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one 
central human thing that Mr. Howells is too often 
tempted to neglect: I mean himself? A poet, a 
finished artist, a man in love with the appearances 
of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other 



276 MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 

passions and aspirations than those he loves to 
draw. And why should he suppress himself and do 
such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The ob- 
vious is not of necessity the normal ; fashion rules 
and deforms ; the majority fall tamely into the con- 
temporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the 
true observer, only a higher power of insignifi- 
cance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw 
the normal, a man should draw the null, and write 
the novel of society instead of the romance of 
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